POET AS HOLY FOOL (JURODIVYJ): POETRY AS FOLLY (JURODSTVO)

Abstract

This article deals with folly as a way of being in the world and poet’s lifecreation as one of the forms of its realization. The aim of the article is to show and ground poetic creativity as natural, inborn folly, which has its own specifics in comparison with other forms. The article consists of three parts. The first of them – Fall out in search of the interlocutor – shows that the poet falls out of the empirical language milieu, mechanical, stillborn, imposed, not thinking word, equally to all inherent material shell, gradually becoming our inner, spiritual fetters. The poet falls out of the world that is alien, has been thoughtout and designated before. The poet creates something, or more precisely – allows the appearance of something that runs counter to the way of communication accepted in the human community. The poet appeals to the mysterious, providential interlocutor. The second part – The sacrifice of the self – shows that the poet’s work, one’s good will to reveal the true reality and strengthen the world order is connected with the sacrifice of the self, the elimination of one’s sinful human «ego». The poet understands and accepts world’s sinfulness as one’s personal sin, as one’s personal stripped sinfulness. Dying for this world, rejecting its momentary values and asserting eternal values, the poet heals the wounds of the universe and thus restores the transcendental health of life, upset by violence and death. The third part – From defamiliarization of the text to elimination of oneself – actualizes the distinctive feature of poetry as a written text. In comparison with other types of art, poetry looks like the most ascetic given – no beauty, no external aesthetic cover – the extreme degree of bareness of the verse, the clothes of the Holy Spirit, the ideal clothes of the holy fool. The poet writes down at the same time something definite and undefined, something present and absent, and so every time the necessary signs must be extracted and thought over. The poet seeks a special language, a special speech, in order to let appear those things and relations, which manifest themselves, dictate, and point only here-and-now. The author concludes that the depth of the whole personality of a human-poet is measured by the measure of the poetic folly, which presupposes daily sacrifice, continuous, hidden from human eyes. In terrible, apocalyptic times, when the native and universal is overthrown, when bread is poisoned and the air is drunk, when the powerful dispose of what they have no right to dispose of, then these so-called celestials turn from ordinary holy fools into dangerous holy ones. They become exposers, prophets, unwanted to the authorities. The poet, as an organ of people’s vision, speaks for the people, reveals the cruel truth. The poet’s word, like the audacious word of a holy fool, has great power. It literary burns – does not accept, rejects the values of this world, and reminds of the other, everlasting, greatest and priceless gifts.