НИЖНИЙ ТАГИЛ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ПОЭЗИИ УРАЛА. ЕКАТЕРИНА СИМОНОВА

Abstract

This article focuses on the images of Nizhny Tagil in the contemporary poetry of the Urals. The phenomenon of “Nizhny Tagil poetic school” or “Nizhny Tagil renaissance” emerged in the early 2000s when young poets of Evgeny Turenko’s circle entered the poetry scene. This “school” lasted for about a decade but made a mark in the history of literature. The paradoxical imagery of the native city in its representatives’ poems stems from the fact that Nizhny Tagil is mostly portrayed as a “negative locus” or as a kind of “negative space”, in D. Davydov’s words. This is observed primarily in the poems of E. Turenko himself; in the poetry of his students, whenever the city is mentioned, it is shown from a negative perspective or altogether replaced by the town of Kushva. A different image of the city is presented in the poetry of Ekaterina Simonova, who also emerged from the Nizhny Tagil school and is now living in Ekaterinburg. The image of Tagil in her poems is closely connected to the themes of memory, family, and the lineage of the poetess, to which she feels a personal belonging. This is the reason why in her poetic world objects are so important; they keep traces not only of memories and past lives, but also the impressions of close people to whom she gives voice in her poems. Capturing the history of everyday life, Simonova creates poetic novellas in which life-stories of different people flow into one another. Nizhny Tagil here is portrayed as a place to which the lyrical heroine constantly returns, its mental map is revealed through the trajectory of the heroine’s movements and her constant peering into herself as the “other”. It exists in the achronic dimension, it is truly an “eternal city”, serving as a reference point during her encounters with other cities and people.