Hai Zi – Chinese Sergei Yesenin: tanatological poetics and “romance with death”

Abstract

The article considers the work of the Chinese poet Hai Zi (mostly based on works not translated into Russian) as a characteristic example of the spiritual and artistic influence of Sergei Yesenin's work on modern Chinese poetry. The poetic dialogue of Hai Zi and S. Yesenin is considered from the point of view of tanatological poetics, which allows us to present their work as a single meta text, developing various variations of tanatopoetics in order to achieve absolute self-identification by synthesising “self” – death – art. The category of death is considered as the integral basis of the work of S. Yesenin and Hai Zi, which ultimately leads to the realisation of their personal attitude to death as the ontological, epistemological and axiological basis of life and creative work. The article justifies that the “romance with death” of S. Yesenin and Hai Zi is a manifestation of their life-building strategy, consonances in motif and figuration are revealed in the aspect of tanatological poetics, taking into account the different nature of those motifs: the spontaneous-organic feeling of death in S. Yesenin and the tanatological ideology of Hai Zi, based on the synthesis of Western philosophy, Confucianism, Taoism. Particular attention is paid to the consideration of S.Yesenin's poem “The Black Man” and the poem “Spring. Ten Hai Zi” as works that expose the key settings of the poets' tanatological discourse, as well as an analysis of Hai Zi's poem "Life Was Interrupted" as prisms for the reinterpretation of S. Yesenin's life and work within the framework of the tanatological paradigm of "Chinese Yesenin" and the most important act of semiotisation of life and creative work of the Chinese youth, when suicide is positioned as the final statement.