The Category of Conscience in the Works of V.A. Mamchenko (By Foreign Publications)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the work of the Russian poet of the first wave of emigration Viktor Andreyevich Mamchenko (1901—1982), reflected in his foreign publications in Russian. Returning the name of this author, now half-forgotten in his homeland, to culture and introducing him into literary circulation, the article is the first attempt to reveal the originality of V.A. Mamchenko’s creative thought, based on the poet’s religious, philosophical and moral searches. The object of the research is the foreign publications of V.A. Mamchenko’s artistic works in individual books and almanacs published in France and identified from the catalogs of leading Russian libraries (the Russian State Library, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russia Abroad). The memoires and reviews of V.A. Mamchenko’s contemporaries served as auxiliary material for the study. The article reveals the key milestones in the poet’s biography, which contributed to the formation of his creative style. There is traced the evolution of V.A. Mamchenko from the futuristic tendencies of the early period to the “high tongue-tie” and dissolution in the landscape of the middle and late periods of his creativity. There are identified the main moral-philosophical, God-seeking, religious and mystical categories, which were incorporated in the works of V.A. Mamchenko, who had been developing them for half a century. One of the key categories is conscience, which, according to V.A. Mamchenko, unites moral, philosophical and religious principles, permeating all the milestones of his work. Particular attention is paid to the individual works of V.A. Mamchenko — articles, poems, poetry cycles — as the most structured by the poet. Their chronological examination and comparison in the context of the main categories highlighted by the poet (hero, God, fear, death, conscience, awakening) allow to observe the vector nature of V.A. Mamchenko’s creativity, presented as an illustration of the soul’s path (the movement of the hero’s love) to God, where conscience acts as an accompanying inner core and compass.