Russian Poetry as an Ethical and Aesthetic Dominant in the Work of the Poets of the “Thaw” (on the Example of D. Samoilov’s Poems)

Abstract

Using the poem “Pestel, the Poet and Anna” as an example, it is shown how admiration for the “golden” and “silver age” of Russian poetry, which act as a single ethical and aesthetic tuning fork, is combined in D. Samoilov’s poems. So, Pestel’s speech is sustained in the spirit of the Decembrist poetics, which was read by Samoilov through the prism of O. Mandelstam’s poem “The Decembrist”. In addition, the image of the Moldavian woman Anna, singing outside the window during the conversation between Pushkin and Pestel, appears as a poetic ideal that unites three significant eras for D. Samoilov: Pushkin’s, Akhmatova’s and his own. The purpose of the article is to trace, using the example of D. Samoilov’s poems, how such an appeal to the poetry of the “Golden” and “Silver Ages” (as to a single indisputable model) is fulfilled in the work of poets of the 1960s.