Древний Рим в иносказательном контексте позднесоветской культуры: три “исторических” стихотворения

Abstract

This paper offers a genealogy of Roman-themed writing in recent Russian cultural history, with special attention for so-called “Soviet antiquity” – that is, the extent to which allusions to the history of Ancient Rome were used and allowed within officially accepted Soviet literature. The author maps and compares different instances of interest towards Roman antiquity among poets of the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that there was a strong tendency towards using Roman subject matter as part of the Aesopian language of the time, transforming covert messages into explicit expressions of the author’s viewpoint. More pointedly, the author unpacks the social and literary context of Rome-inspired Jaan Kaplinski’s (‘Vercingetorix’) and David Samoilov’s (‘Remus and Romulus’) lyric poetry, as well as their relationship with Classical subject matter and nineteenth-century civil poetry. The analysis also traces how Roman mythologemes developed in writings by coeval poets. In their work, ancient exempla morph into a source for ideological and literary creation. Bulat Okudzhava’s poem ‘Roman Empire’ is analysed as an act of reflection about the tradition of allegory in civil poetry, and as a mark of the poet’s weariness of Aesopian language in historical situations like the decline of the Roman Empire.