The Topics and Mythopoetics of the Revolution in the Mass Poetry of the Urals between 1917 and 1919

Abstract

This article considers poetry published in Ural periodicals between 1917 and 1919. It mainly comprises journalistic newspaper verses that are of interest from the point of view of how they reflect public opinion about the events of the 1917 revolutions and the Civil War in the Urals. The range of judgments and assessments of the events in question is determined not only by personal and political preferences, but primarily by the collective notions that are characteristic of mass consciousness. The author of the article concentrates on this aspect. He is interested in stable motifs and images that go back to the collective unconscious of the Ural public. To designate these universals immersed in tradition, he sometimes employs overlapping concepts: topos, archetype, and mythologeme. They assimilate various mental spheres — politics, religion, everyday consciousness, and establish a correlation of an image with timeless scales and thereby take the modeling of that image of the revolution to a higher level of figurative generalisations. The article examines individual figural details and motifs (parallels Revolution — Easter, connections with calendar rituals, seasons, agrarian mythology, colour and light symbols), as well as the meta-story of revolutionary poetry that included the modifying figures of the Hero, Enemy, Victim, depicted Revolution as a struggle and a difficult path to paradise (communism). As a result, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that reliance on common cultural experience based on archetypal principles promotes a profound and fruitful comprehension of life in the era of a historical crisis affecting the interests of the general public.