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Abstract:

The article examines the early work of Vyach. Ivanov from the point of view of the problems of Russian cosmism. The subject of the analysis is a cycle of four sonnets (“For a Moment”, “Remembrance”, “Flight” and “Dreams”), first published in the journal “Vestnik Evropy” in 1899. All of them, individually and as part of a whole, focused the main ideological and artistic constants of his poetry, inextricably linked — directly or indirectly — with the famous antinomies of Kant and the ideas of cosmism. According to the proposed hypothesis, the poet’s intense spiritual search resulted in a fascination with religious and mystical teachings and, not least, a predilection for sonnetry. The very fact of intensive use of this classical genre-strophic form, as well as associations of sonnets in significant cycles, including the poem in sonnets and one of the first sonnet wreath experiments in Russia, testifies to the antinomical artistic thinking of the poet-philosopher, so characteristic, according to M.L. Gasparov, of the poetics of modernism in the “Silver Age”. In full accordance with Kant’s second antinomy of the relation of a part and the whole, each of the four sonnets functions both autonomously and as a cyclical unit, like a four-part sonata (exposition, elaboration, reprise and coda). Special attention is paid to the first of them with the characteristic title “For a Moment”, which performs the function of exposure. The analysis of the sonnet demonstrates that antinomic relations determine the substantive and formal aspects of a poem dedicated to the infinitely flowing time and paradoxically the “instant eternity” of the poet’s life.