ОБРАЗ РОСТОВА-НА-ДОНУ В ПОЭМЕ А.И. СОЛЖЕНИЦЫНА «ДОРОЖЕНЬКА»

Abstract

The article for the first time examines the image of Rostov-on-Don, captured in the third and fourth chapters of A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s autobiographical poem “Dorozhenka”. The city is given in the perception of the lyrical hero Sergei Nerzhin, who recalls his childhood and adolescence. When describing Rostov in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the poem carefully restores the lost historical outlook of the city and tells readers about churches and temples destroyed under Soviets, the forced change of names of the streets, etc. Special attention is paid to memories of home and close people with whom the lyrical hero passed his childhood. A bright tangible image of the city with its unique sounds, smells, colors, and socio-cultural atmosphere of those years appear before the reader. Depicting Rostov-on-Don during the NEP period, Solzhenitsyn draws attention to the key feature of that time: on the one hand, there is an illusion of the return of prerevolutionary life, on the other – the pressure of the totalitarian state is increasing. This finds artistic embodiment in the image of a city with a vertically oriented structure. On the high there is a light–flooded, warm, cheerful, dynamic Rostov, below, in the “damp shadow” of the GPU – a city, which is cold, frozen, dull and gloomy, hostile to men. The world of the Gulag grows imperceptibly for the townspeople into a familiar, outwardly calm space. Unlike most, Sergey Nerzhin tries to comprehend his personal experience in a general historical context, to understand himself and the world around him. The autobiographical hero’s memories of his childhood and adolescence spent in Rostov-on-Don become an important step on the way to his spiritual rise.