Journal archive

Abstract: Inner emigration in which such greatest poets as Akhmatova, Mandelstam (further O. M.) and others found themselves after the October revolution became a devastating and agonizing ordeal. The article shows this fatal under the Soviet system socio-psychic state which reflects social alienation and pariahhood of the poets. The real problem was survival of not just an artist but a human being. What was needed was a breakdown of the state of alienation and pariahhood. The article addresses the question: How can the destructive role of a virtually no-win situation of inner emigration be dealt with? The author’s hypothesis: poetry assumes the function of spiritual surmounting-overcoming as well as compensation for a social reality of “the Soviet” deeply corrosive to the poets’ fragile subjectivity. Responding to a question on “how this problem is resolved in O. M. poetry” the author recognizes understanding of art as a continuation, duplication and realization of culture’s potential. “Spiritually-psychic” shelter of poets-inner èmigrès is created according to common logic and general structures / matrixes of culture as a process and the result of human cultural familiarization with the world. Culture has two “basic” substantive lines of mastering. The first one: transformation-humanization of nature; the second one is the provision of organized living, or the production of socium. Since a poet as a human is a social being in need of community, communication and identification, then a poetically constructed virtual society with values close to these of the poet acts as an alternative to social pariahhood, alienation and loneliness. Analyzing this “O. M. socium” the author, in addition to the culturological approach, rests on F. Tönnies community-society theory, ideas of social construction, socio-cultural anthropology, and hermeneutics. The article presents principal elements of an “ideal socium” in the poetry of O. M. (elements taken from its socio-cultural past and present) and spiritual-psychological “effects” of this “socium”: acquisition of togetherness and mutual bonds, and realization of socio-cultural identity. It is noted, however, that this poetical social reality, while being helpful to O. M., fails to remove the drama and tragedy from his existence.