Eventfulness in Russian Non-Canonical Idyll

Abstract

The article offers a solution to the problem of eventfulness, characteristic for the poetic idyll in Russian poetry of the XIX–XXI centuries. Due to a shift in emphasis in the perception of idyllic heritage, а number of scholars define this genre as “eventless”. In particular, it is the idyll in the non-canonical era that is used by a number of poets as a sign of a “consummate word”, which is usually disintegrated in genre struggle for the right to complete a lyrical whole. In this case poems, using idyllic topoi, as a rule, are completed according to the models of other lyrical genres, such as elegies, epistles, ballads. However, there is a creative strategy for employing idyll, in which the eventfulness characteristic of the genre turns out to be found as a result of genre struggle. In this case, an idyllic event of value fusion, the coincidence of poetic consciousness with the world, passing through the test of the plot of other lyrical genres, is found in the event of a lyrical utterance. The elimination of the boundary between the inner and outer worlds (which is predestined in the canonical idyll and found in the non- canonical one) can be considered as the stem of the genre that survived the canon, unlike other genre conventions that turned out to be optional. At the same time, the non-canonical version of the implementation of the idyllic perspective of the worldview is a short moment of peace, won from the non-idyllic world, which one wants to repeat. Reflection performs a destructive function in a collision with a predetermined “ready-made word” of the genre, but it turns out to be able to pronounce it anew as a proper word, exposing its eventfulness. It is the nakedness of the specific eventfulness of the idyll that becomes a distinctive feature of the genre in the non-canonical era.