The Oeuvre of R. Wagner in Boris Poplavsky’s Creative Reception

Abstract


 The paper is a study of how the heritage of composer, philosopher and opera reformer Richard Wagner is perceived in the works by poet Boris Poplavsky. The poet appeals to Wagner and symbolists in what he refers to as the integrity of all the elements of being in the World Symphony (Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk). Symbolists highly valued the vital theurgic force of music, connected with transformation and creation. Poplavsky embraces the concept of the World Symphony and the idea of the integrating power of music, but in his understanding of the nature of this unity, he is far from being traditionalist. He views the fusion of the heterogeneous elements of being through the prism of the congenial phenomenological theory of music-time, emerging in chaos and perpetually vanishing in the depths of a certain transcendental force he named The Absolute. Poplavsky is a transitional figure in the history of the Russian culture. On the one hand, the poet proves to be a successor to the ideas of Richard Wagner and the Russian symbolists, and on the other hand, his ideas of music-time are related to the spirit of the western European philosophy of the 1920‒1930-ies.