Article

Name: The “Living Statues” at Times of Mausoleums and Unknown Soldiers: New Commemorative Practices in the Mirror of Russian 20th Century Poetry

Authors: K. V. Anisimov

iberian Federal University (Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation)

Abstract: The article traces the alterations of the “harmful statue” motif as it was conceptualized by Roman Jakobson. In the present research the author draws upon a number of representative verses by Russian 20 th century poets – V. Bryusov, I. Selvinsky, B. Slutsky. The theoretical juxtaposition of the metaphoric nature of a monument and strategies of overcoming this nature has been put in focus of this work. These strategies are represented in the convergence of sculpture and body (the reinforcement of iconicity), in implicating the metonymic, substitutional character in new monuments. The author shows how the practice of establishing the new “political” tombs (unknown soldiers, mausoleums) proliferating since 1920s was reflected in verses’ rhetoric and affected these texts’ genre poetics. As a first collection of examples the “Pompeian” plots of Russian “ekphrastic” poetry are studied. Here Russian poets rethink the technology invented by mid-nineteenth century Italian archaeologists who were the first to introduce the sculptural reconstruction of human bodies preserved by volcanic soil in area of 79 a.d. Vesuvius eruption. The first step on this way of rethinking the “living statue” motif was the intrinsic to modernism and openly exposed problematizing of the relationships between body and its representations in stone or metal. Having begun its “own” life, the sculpture is currently observed as a direct, “drawn on a contour” replica of an organism, unprecedented in unicity of its physical existence. This semiotic discovery has formed the receptive “niches” of expectations – prior to the emergence of the next commemorative practice, the creation in 1924 Vladimir Lenin’s “living sculpture” (A. Yurchak) or “self-icon” (J. B. Platt). However one difference here was of specific significance: the “Pompeian” plaster reconstructions were anonymous whereas the Bolshevik leader’s name was in contrast not just commonly known but also as strongly mythologized as his remains kept in mausoleum were. The semiosis taking place within a triangle body – monument – name had formed a perspective for the forthcoming of a new social commemorative practice, memory place and poetic image – the tomb of an Unknown Soldier. The author illustrates the interaction of the two political and memory cults on the level of official rhetoric and in the sphere of literary motifs.

Keywords: Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Lenin’s Mausoleum, the places of memory, poetic ballads, sculptural ekphrasis, Valery Bryusov, Ilya Selvinsky, Boris Slutsky

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