The Terrible in the Works of Adamist Poets S. Gorodetsky, V. Narbut, and M. Zenkevich

Abstract

This article analyses the terrible in the works of Adamist poets to identify common features and patterns in their creative work. Adamism is both a synonym for Acmeism and the designation of its left wing, represented by S. Gorodetsky, V. Narbut, and M. Zenkevich. Accepting the basic postulates of Gumilyov’s Acmeism (supported by A. Akhmatova and O. Mandelstam) about the primordial attitude to reality, the priority of objectivity in the composition of the artistic world which sought to acquire earthly contours and outlines, Adamists were much more resolute about the possibility of considering a wide range of everyday phenomena and everyday things worthy of artistic comprehension. Physiologism, the animal nature in humans, and primitive savage impulses also became a favorite basis for Adamists for their naturalistic pictorial solutions. This vitalist approach was combined with an interest in the spontaneous, pagan, and folklore and ethnographic. The bearers of the terrible in V. Narbut are disgusting and ugly things, people, animals, representatives of folk demonology, mystical creatures, and zombies. Their appearance and existence are associated with a violation of the norm, deformity or disfiguring disease, the appearance of evil spirits, and the domination of death and decay. All this, for the characters and the lyrical subject himself, was a manifestation of the Otherworldly and the intrusion of a frightening Other into everyday life. The material and biological basis presented through the prism of coarse physiology, animal struggle for existence, and aggressive struggle of the sexes determines the interpretation of the terrible in M. Zenkevich’s poetry. The article examines how any layers of culture collapse and terrible crimes and murders are committed when primitive animal and wild subconscious instincts are released. The evolution of the terrible in Zenkevich is related to the movement from the eschatology of the natural-cosmic catastrophism of the Earth to the eschatology of personality, the comprehension of the tragedy of the individual’s existence. Gorodetsky’s poetry is associated with the folk poetic element, ethnographic excursions, interest in social issues, and anti-urbanism. Many thematic sections of the terrible combine Gorodetsky’s work with the work of literary brothers in Adamism: interest in the primary and primordial, folk demonology, nightmares, and death. The peculiarity of Gorodetsky’s approach to the problem of the terrible manifests itself in the artistic embodiment of the motif of the mask, hiding the conflict between the deceptive phenomenon and the essence of things: for the poet, the loss of individuality, facelessness, and alienation are terrible.