Журнал «Филоlogos»

The Poem by N. Gumilev ''The olden days'': Elegiac poetics in the light of heroics

Author: Chevtaev A.A.

The article considers the poetics of the poem ''The Olden Days'' (1908) by N.S. Gumilev in the light of its genre-modal implementation. This text, included by the poet in the composition of his third book of poems ''The Pearls'' (1910), is the first experience of Gumilev's understanding of the manor and noble life of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. This experience of being receives a negative interpretation in the reception of Gumilev. The negation of the manor locus in the text is associated with the specifics of the implementation of the elegiac worldview, which is complicated by the ambiguity of subject relations on the axes ''present - past'' and ''microcosm-macrocosm''. The analysis of the poem based on the structural-semantic approach to the study of the lyric, shows that, first, there is the reorganization of the elegiac poetics, which is made of the value exchange between ''the self'' in the present and ''they'' (the family name) in the past, and secondly, self-determination elegiac lyric ''I'' in terms of the reflexive experiences of ''old days'' is aimed at the attainment of an ideal future. It is concluded that poetics of the poem ''The Olden Days'' (1908) by Gumilev, explicating the obvious elegy of the lyric subject's perception of the simulated reality, reveals an axiological aspiration to the heroic overcoming / mastering of the world order. Accordingly, the elegiac experiences of the Gumilev's subject are associated not so much with the loss of the old Russian manor model of life, as with the acquisition of an empirical experience of assimilation of reality and the ideal. At the same time, the first obviously begins to take possession of the poet’s artistic intentions, and the second - acquires the status of an axiological guide in a multidimensional universe. Such an elegiac exit of the poetic ''the self'', professing the values of the heroic order, to the antinomies of the universe, which do not fit into the usual symbolist framework of the ephemeral and true, becomes a significant stage in the mythopoetic reorganization of Gumilev's artistic universe during the creation of the book of poems ''The Pearls''. The poem ''The Olden Days'' appears as an important value-semantic parameter of the formation of the future Gumilev's myth about Russia.