Authors

Daria SINICHKINA¹;  ¹ Faculté des Lettres Sorbonne Université, France

Discussion

In his seminal work of 1998 (« Smert’ poeta: Iosif Brodski »), George (Georgy) Levinton showed the existence of a “Death of a Poet” cycle in Russian poetry, one that should be approached as a semiotic text. Intertextuality plays an important role in it, even more so since numerous 'tombeaux' written in Russian play out the death of a poet as a rebirth in form of quotations. Within this cycle, one can draw out a specific sub-genre of poems written in the first-person singular in which the poet’s own death is imagined and projected. All throughout the XXth century, in the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sergey Esenin, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolay Klyuev, Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Oleg Chukhontsev, Viktor Sosnora and many others, one finds at least one example of this kind of poetic self-necrology. This “death of a poet” sub-cycle draws on the tradition of poetic monuments in Russian poetry from the XVIIIth century, as well as on the heritage of 'in memoriam' poetic practices. Looking at the poetry of the second half of XXth century, from Gleb Gorbovsky to Boris Ryzhy, this paper examines intertextual dynamics between numerous « deathbed self-portraits », with the aim of adding to the definition of the « Death of a Poet » cycle in Russian poetry.