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Abstract:

The article considers the “absurdist” reconstruction by Alexander Vvedensky of the historical meanings of the Martos’s monument to Minin and Pozharsky on Red Square, associated with the events of the second Time of Troubles. The internal chronology of the poem connects the events of three Russian liberation wars of 1612, 1709 and 1812 with the civil war (1918–1921). Vvedensky refers not so much to historical events and facts as to their interpretation by Russian literature from S.A. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov to Velimir Khlebnikov, and offers his own version, corresponding to the new historical space of the year 1926, which became a turning point for the fate of Russia. This time marks the peak of the NEP, the triumph of culturalism and the struggle for a “new way of life”. Its results, according to L. Trotsky’s plan, were to be the destruction of the national way of life, national culture and universal unification as a requirement of the new Soviet civilization. Allusions of Vvedensky’s absurdist poem build an associative chain leading the reader along the trail of Pushkin’s military-historical texts to modern texts — Khlebnikov’s and Yesenin’s “Pugachevs”, and represent an artistic experience of the hermeneutics of the space of Russian history, imprinted in the plastic form of the Martos’s monument — an experience that the poet undertakes on the eve of the anniversary year for the Soviet power.