Reception of History in the Poem of D. Tumanny (N. N. Panov) The House in Sverdlovsk (1926)

Abstract

This article examines the poem The House in Sverdlovsk (1926) by the futurist presentist and constructivist Dir Tumanny (pseudonym of Nikolai Nikolayevich Panov) as a fact of reception of the death of the Russian Emperor Nicholas Romanov and his family in the summer of 1918 in Ekaterinburg. Also, the author of the article considers the poem as a complex artistic statement reflecting and scaling the sense of history inherent both in the hero of the poem and the lyrical epic narrator and the author himself. In the space of the “Romanov text”, D. Tumanny’s poem is a unique precedent starting from the death of the tsar and his family but focusing not so much on it as a historical fact only but on the present modeled according to the Komfut ideals as a combination of the technocratic utopia of futurism and the social utopia of socialism and endowed with historical significance. However, the true content of The House in Sverdlovsk is the author’s dialogue with the powerful artistic tradition. Characteristic of the lyrical epic poem of Pushkin’s time and a completely outdated Byronic hero makes a pilgrimage to the Ipatiev House and is immediately replaced by pictures of Sverdlovsk being built (which becomes another hero of the poem). The features of a novella are combined with the optics of a travelogue essay, and Pushkin’s abundant intertext (the epigraph, allusions, and specific stylistic devices including the usage of the octave and referring to The House in Kolomna, Eugene Onegin, The Stone Guest, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai) is only the upper layer of a deeper poetic adherence to Pushkin’s tradition. It is the playful focus of the author of the poem who presented the pilgrimage as an anecdote that reduces the reception of a historical event and in some way deprives it of historical status and even more so than the ideological guidelines of Soviet historiography which D. Tumanny undoubtedly adopted.