Topos of a doorstep in the lyrics of Georgi Ivanov

Abstract

The eschatological issues are integral part of late Georgi Ivanov’s lyrics. They get their artistic realization in the original style poetry and in the development of the archetypal motif of life / death, revealed through metaphorical images of the boundaries, doors, and windows. The article is devoted to the lyrical and philosophical topos in the lyrics Ivanov in the period of the emigration. The texts of the cycles Roses, Departure to the island Citer, Portrait No Similarity, Diary and Posthumous Diary, fragments from the poem The Decay of the Atom are studied. The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that an interpretation of topos as a formula which lies in the impersonal depths of the literary process makes it possible to interpret the author in a broad national-cultural context. The article concludes that the topos of a doorstep presented in the poetry of Ivanov marks existential reflection of the situation in the borderland, and the constancy with which the poet returned to this subject. It indicates his tendency to transgression. A study of the original interpretation of G. Ivanov’s lyrics of the doorstep topos and of a number of correlating motives allows to visualize the dynamics of the artistic forms of expression and ideological position of the author. A correlation with the classical literary context convinces us that the extreme focus on the situation of the frontier designated it the artist who continued, after Dostoevsky, Tiutchev, Tolstoy, Russian traditions of existential consciousness. The “experience of the limit” which was reflected in the works of G. Ivanov and inherited from the Silver Age, and survival skills in emigration gave this tradition a new dimension.

Keywords:

topos, Georgi Ivanov, emigration, Diary, transgression, oxymoron, symbolism, dichotomy, borderlands