Городской текст в художественном мире Семена Кесельмана

Abstract

The article deals with the collection of poetry „Glass Dreams” (Steklyannye sny) by Semen Keselman – the Odessa poet of the Silver Age – and it focuses on the peculiarities of the author’s conceptualization of the city image and on the literary explication of different urban text models. During his early creative stage Keselman organically included allusive images of the Symbolist Petersburg text in the development of his conception and the textual model of this city. The poem „The City” (Gorod, 1910) is characterized by a balance between content and expression, artistic and aesthetic consistency, meeting the format of the symbolist discourse, though it embodies in the process of text-creation the author’s interpretation of the image of St. Petersburg. While developing the Odessa text model in the poem „In the Red House” (V krasnom dome, 1913) Keselman relied on the decisional in the Silver Age and significantly presented in A. Blok’s poetry image of the city as a product of civilization, which ‘swallows’ humanity and is therefore „alien” to it. But Keselman – as a poet of the modernist consciousness – creatively adapts Blok’s literary prototext images and symbols to the topology and the poetics of his own literary world. Keselman’s Odessa text as well as Blok’s Petersburg text illustrates the existance of the democratic environment; they can be distinguished by the pathos of existence, which is motivated in case of the Odessa poet by the topographic factor of the southern sea and the desire to overcome the universalism of the symbolist world with the daily living factography. By getting involved in the creative dialogue with maitres of the modernist poetic culture, Keselman illustrated the ability to verify his own literary solutions. The analyzed urban texts from the volume of poetry „Glass Dreams” allows us to conclude the signs of the original author’s world.