Tickets for the steamboat of modernity

Abstract

The article examines the poetry collections printed by Voymega publishers in their new series ‘Pyroscaphe.’ Authors of the six collections published so far are young poets who participated in the literary seminar ‘The way to literature. Continued’ held by the Moscow Writers’ Union in 2019: M. Bessonov, D. Nozdryakov, B. Peygin, K. Tarayan, E. Uliankina, and V. Fedotov. Despite their very dissimilar poetics, the study of their works enables the critic to trace certain common features that define the new generation of poets. In particular, Batalov believes that each author tells their own myth. What unites those myths are the concept of the post-Soviet childhood (with all realia typical of the 1990s), the crossing of the border between life and death, and idealization of the provinces; it is also pointed out that each of the authors eventually arrives at the myth of Hades, the kingdom of shadows, where human souls are roaming in solitude. In conclusion, Batalov proposes to poets that if they cannot overcome the inertia of mythological thinking, they should at least mitigate it by addressing reality.