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Abstract:

The article considers the peculiarities of verse composition of the outstanding Russian poet and translator Grigory Petnikov, who started his way in the framework of the Kharkov version of Russian Futurism, was one of the associates and collaborators of V. Khlebnikov, and ended up as a typical Soviet poet. At the same time, Petnikov was engaged in literary translation (he translated poems by Rilke and Rimbaud, prose by Novalis, Kleist, the Brothers Grimm, Ukrainian and Belarusian folk tales, and much more), which strongly influenced the author’s verse poetics, above all his free verse, which Petnikov turned to from 1914 onwards. The paper examines in detail the evolution of Petnikov’s vers libre, from the early abstruse and heteromorphic verse forms through the experiments of pure free verse, which appeared in the verse form of the joint “Appeal of the Chairmen of the Globe” with Khlebnikov and the large poems of the 1930s and late 1960s. Petnikov’s verbatim translations from European, American and Asian poetry, their genesis and ideology are considered separately.