Article

Name: Peculiarity of the memory plot in the poem by Boris Volkov “Brought on the scaffold”

Authors: Proskurina E. N., Silantev I. V.

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract:

The paper is devoted to the poetry of Boris Volkov, the forgotten author of the Eastern emi-gration (1894–1954). During his lifetime, only a single collection of his poems, “In the Dust of Foreign Roads,” was published in 1934. The plot movement in the book appears as the memory narrative, reflecting the dramatic life experience of the author. He finds himself in the very midst of Russian history, at the beginning of the 20th century: participation in the First World War, service in the White Army, fight against the Pan-Mongol movement of Ungern, flight to China, and emigration to America. Of particular intrigue was the last part of the book “Brought on the scaffold. Excerpts from a poem,” with the action taking place during the anti-Spanish revolution in the Netherlands of the 16th century. The study has shown that the dramatic turns of the author’s biography, during his struggle against Ungern, are reflected through the roll call of historical epochs. The analysis involved Volkov’s memoirs dedicated to this period. The image of an inquisitor who burns heretics and the pictures of executions refers to the episodes of sophisticated torture of prisoners initiated by the baron and captured in Volkov’s memoirs. Thus, the work implicitly draws the author’s modernity, the events of the 16th century, into its whirlpool by making it one of its reflections.

Keywords: Eastern emigration, poetry of B. Volkov, Baron Ungern, the Spanish Inquisition, “Hammer of the Witches”, memory plot, intertext

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