“The winter of history came suddenly...”: the concept of time in the poems of Victor Krivulin

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of historicism in the texts of the Leningrad unofficial poet and critic Viktor Krivulin. The novelty of the study is an attempt to consider the poetic historiosophy of Krivulin in the context of the “religious revival” of the 1970s in the USSR. This approach allows us not only to determine the specifics of the images of time in the works of Krivulin, but also to outline the contours of the intellectual history of Soviet unofficial culture. Special attention is paid to eschatological motives in Krivulin's works, as well as to the opposition of the “horizontal” and “vertical” types of time. Everyday reality, with its measured course of events subordinated to the chronological order, is overcome in Krivulin's texts by entering the sacred sphere of culture, where creative dialogue with literary predecessors is endowed with a special value status. It was cultural co-creation that allowed the unofficial poet to go beyond the static late Soviet experience and rediscover his identity. The images of time in Krivulin's texts are associated with Christian eschatology, which assumes the finality of historical existence. This was most clearly manifested in the transformation of the image of Leningrad, which appeared in the works of Krivulin as a “ghost town”, in which history stopped.