America in the Silver Age of Russian poetry: The beginning of cultural conceptualization
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33910/2687-1262-2020-2-1-52-59Keywords:
Silver Age poetry, America, image, cultural conceptualizationAbstract
The artistic image of America began to take shape in the 19th century Russian prose and journalism and became one of the universals of Russian culture. Its poetic interpretation, however, started in the early 20th century. The article explores the origin of the poetic conceptualization of America as a continent, state, and cultural space in the poetry of the Silver Age. The analysis of poems by N. Gumilyov, S. Yesenin, V. Mayakovsky, and others identified the semantic features of the poetic representation of America as well as the repertoire of the main semantic messages about the country. The important conceptual components of the image are the “discovery of America”, “Columbus”, “America as an earthly paradise”, “a distant place, an object of dreams”, “a target for development”, and others. The aesthetics of such schools of poetry as futurism and symbolism influenced the style of writing an imagery, however, the key meanings and messages, however, remained very similar. The perception of America changed after the Russian Revolution. Poets who had been to the faraway land tried to provide a realistic description of its advances in industry, urbanization, and multinationalism. They had their ideological principles and were critical of capitalism as a whole. Hence, they viewed absolute rationalism, business and capital — the ultimate American values — as a reason for the loss of spirituality in American culture. The poems now contrasted the two countries — the spiritual Russia and the materialistic America. The contrast later evolved into a more abstract poetic dialogue about the global opposition between the West and the East.
The first attempts of poetic conceptualization of a different culture subsequently underpinned the artistic conceptualization of America in the 20th century fiction, poetry, and journalism. Their impulses can still be traced in the common perception Russians have of America as a country, which is confirmed by linguistic dictionaries and studies in humanities.
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