Художественная специфика лирики казачьего поэта Н. А. Келина

Abstract

The paper aims to determine the artistic distinctness of the lyric poetry of the little-studied Cossack poet of the Russian émigré community N. A. Kelin. The paper identifies the main themes, images and motifs of his poems. Attention is paid to the structural and rhythmic features of his works (a tail-rhyme stanza, musicality), to the use of folklore techniques by the poet. The scientific novelty of the research consists in revealing the song-like nature of Kelin’s poems, in noting the close connection of the persona with national spiritual values. The research findings showed that the system of images and motifs of Kelin’s lyric poetry is based on folklore traditions. In terms of genre, the author’s poems are close to folk songs; parallelism, lexical repetitions, addresses, diminutive suffixes, dialectisms are often present in his works. In Kelin’s creative work, there are often features of animistic thinking, as well as the veneration of ancestral ties, the masculine principle, which was embodied in the idealised image of his grandfather. The poet employs the image of Russia, the main Cossack images: the horse, the wind, the steppe, the Don, often uses the opposition “familiar – foreign”. The motif of the “Grandfather Don” is the leading one in Kelin’s creative work and forms the image of the homeland in his artistic consciousness.