ПОЕЗІЯ ФЕДОРА СОЛОГУБА І ФРАНЦУЗЬКИЙ СИМВОЛІЗМ

Abstract

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the lyrics of Fyodor Sologub and his predecessors, French symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. The poetry of Sologub is considered in the context of the main provisions of symbolist aesthetics, set forth in the theoretical works of Jean Moréas and lectures of Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Fyodor Sologub became interested in poetry of the French Symbolists at the end of the 1880s and did not stop thereafter. The first significant poet for the Russian symbolist was Paul Verlaine, whose poems were so consonant with Sologub’s worldview that the latter considered them as an organic part of his work. The picturesqueness and musicality of Verlaine's poems, his methods of suggestion, mystical irony, as well as the highest level of verification became for Sologub a starting point and one of the most important guidelines in his work. Sologub enters into a poetic dialogue with Charles Baudelaire. The undertaken comparative analysis of their poems showed that, having common aesthetic features, aims and values (the idea of correspondences, the opposition of the sacred and profane worlds, the aestheticization of the ugly and death, the desire for infinity, theomachism, etc.) and using similar poetic techniques (cyclization, associations, suggestion, grammatical constructions, sound writing, etc.), each poet, however, creates a unique artistic world. In our opinion, the main thing that is the fundamental difference between Baudelaire’s worldview platform and Sologub’s position is the possibility (for Baudelaire) or impossibility (for Sologub) of liberating a person from an illusory and deceitful material world, in which a person is doomed to suffering, and achieving the desired Ideal. In other words, Baudelaire asks the reader riddles, the answer to which is difficult to find, but possible, and Sologub puts the reader face to face with the mystery of the universe, where each new answer is not final and produces more and more new questions.