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Abstract:

The article provides a commentary on the poem by Vyacheslav I. Ivanov “Are you alive, my friend? Why in a dream…” from the cycle of poems “Roman Diary of 1944”. The poem is dedicated to the poet's friend and interlocutor Yuri N. Verkhovsky so it is considered in the context of the correspondence and an epistles of the two poets. Therefore, it is shown how individual images and motifs in the poem, referring to other earlier poems by both Ivanov and Verkhovsky, line up in a single metaplot: the singer as antient and Pushkin's Arion in the waves of wars and revolutions saves his poetic voice and restores peace, memory, and cultural continuity. For instance, the luminary of the muses from Ivanov’s poem refers to the image of the luminary by Verkhovsky in his works of the Civil War, which marks the victory of art and poetry over political cataclysms. The images of the Day of Wrath and the Iron Age are extended from the historical events of the 1900s, which formed the basis of the Ivanov cycle if poems of the same name, through the historical events of the Civil War to the Second World War. However, the symbolic motif of a fiery baptism, which was characteristic of Ivanov's works before his emigration, disappears in his later works. On the contrary in Verkhovsky poems in the 1940s it becomes central.