Article

Name: The associative poetics of the neo-avant-garde text: “Sebastian in Dream” by Vyktor Ivaniv

Authors: Aleksandr A. Zhitenev

Voronezh State University, Voronezh, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: The paper examines the associative structure of a modern neo-avant-garde text by analyzing the poem “Sebastian in Dream” written by Novosibirsk poet Vyktor Ivaniv. This poem’s structure is a palimpsest of intermedial and intertextual allusions allowing the poetry of the Russian and German literary avant-garde to be correlated. The starting point, however, is not a literary impression but a pictorial one − a childhood reproduction of Hans Baldung Grien’s painting “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”, around which the poet’s kenotic myth is constructed. The Sebastian’s image seems synthetic: it is the poet’s image as a sacred sacrifice that is to restore the existence integrity. Ivaniv correlates the texts of G. Trakl (“To the dead in his youth”) and E. Guro (“The poor knight”, “Autumnal dream”), noting their common “dreamlike” worldview, the motif of a dying talented youth, and the reversibility of “sleep” and “trauma”. Young poet’s death grows into a symbol reflecting the tragic structure of the world. When expanding the range of meanings associated with the image of Sebastian-Wilhelm, Ivaniv also broadens the range of literary contexts, recalling the historiosophic concepts of V. Khlebnikov and the visionary compositions of G. Heym. The context correlation aims to remove the boundaries between the word and reality: the protagonist in E. Guro’s books dies not in the text but in the village of Uusikirkko, where the poetess lived with M. Matyushin. Ivaniv combines the “life texts” and “art texts”, with the metaphor of the cut throat illustrating the practices of self-destruction in reality.

Keywords: ekphrasis, intermediality, intermediality, intertextuality, representation, avant-garde poetics

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