DREAM POETICS IN THE LYRICS OF IVAN ZHDANOV. ARTICLE ONE

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to show, through a commentary on four poetic texts in the book “Air and Wind”, the features of I. Zhdanov’s artistic modeling of the metaphysical reality of a dream, its main philosophical and literary context, the associated features of the poet’s worldview and the poetics corresponding to them. We conclude that when the poet shapes metaphysical reality he appeals to folklore and mythological sources (dreams perceived as death as reflected by Russian proverbs, myth about the son of the Thunder-God, tradition of serious laughter etc.), to the religious and philosophical heritage of P. Florensky, psychoanalytic tradition ( Z. Freud, K.-G. Jung, and others), and the artistic experience of classical and non-classical authors (A. S. Pushkin, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. Dante, symbolist poets, the inside-out theory by K. Kedrov). We argue that the event-driven development of the dream in the texts under consideration follows the logic of the mysterialarchaeoplot of death and rebirth. For instance, in the poem “The Soul Will Wake Up And Then…”, the folklore character of Alionushka falls asleep as if immersing into whisper-death, and her dream is projected onto the journey of Dante and Virgil in the “Divine Comedy” through the funnel-shaped hell. P. Florensky analyzed this dream within the laws of probability theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and “reversed” time, which is directed to the absolute beginning, going from consequences back to causes. The intersubjective organization and neosyncretic images of the dream-oriented poet’s texts are interpreted in the article from the point of view of historical poetics and Jungian dream theory. In particular, the first verse in the text “Before the Word” (“You are a stage and an actor in an empty theater”) refers to a dream as a theater, where the dreamer is simultaneously a play-writer, an actor, and a stage, as it was understood by the Austrian psychoanalyst. In conclusion, the article states that the poetics of the dream in Zhdanov’s works have modernist origins and are contingent on the author’s creative way of thinking.