The Oriental context of the topos of the garden in Russian "Fin de siècle" poetry

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the functioning of the topos of the garden in the subject–spatial organization of Russian poetic texts of the 1880s-1890s with a vector to the exoticism of the East. The subject of the study is a garden in the oriental context of poems of the designated period. The object is lyrical works of Russian poets of the last two decades of the XIX century, focused on the eastern context. Particular attention is paid to oriental imagery, which is transferred to the sphere of the universal language of poetry, into which poets translate the subjectivist attitude to the transformation of the real world into an ideal one. The specificity of the material and the multidimensional nature of its consideration determined the general philosophical principles of historicism and consistency as a methodological basis. The research is based on the synthesis of historical-genetic, comparative-historical, functional, intertextual methods. The main conclusions of the study: 1) in the space of the oriental locus of lyrical works of the 1880s-1990s, the garden most often acts as cultural-specific units; 2) unlike the poets of the past decades, the authors of the "fin de siécle" era more often refer to Sufi symbolism itself. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the poetic heritage of the Muslim East in the texts of the "epoch of timelessness" – pre-symbolism, as well as the initial stage of the symbolist trend, has not previously become the object of systematic research. According to E.A. Tahodi's fair remark, in the last three decades, Russian science has grown interest "in the figures of the "second row", in the epochs of transformation of traditional literary paradigms, including pre-symbolism," which remains the least studied page in the history of Russian literature of the XIX century.