The Kizhi island in Russian literature of the Khrushchev Thaw

This article discusses the representations of the Kizhi island in Russian literature of the end of the 1950s-1960s and what caused the writers' reference to this place. The particular attention is given to the works of "the Sixtiers" (the literary generation of the 1960s) - Yu. Kazakov, A. Voznesensky, R. Rozhdestvensky, whose popularity coincided with the popularity of the Kizhi among tourists. The research is based on literary texts, literary criticism in the central and local press, and archive documents from the Museum-Preserve "Kizhi". The 1960s-1970s gave most of the works about Kizhi in the Soviet press - poems, travel essays, short stories. Kazakov looks for seclusion here. Evtushenko compares the Transfiguration Church with Pushkin's poetry. It is not by chance that the Sixtiers get interested in Kizhi: the Khrushchev Thaw was a period when many people discovered this Northern island that used to be inaccessible before. Besides, the Kizhi Pogost became very popular because it responded to new social, cultural and spiritual needs. Among those was a request for the "national", "historic". This search substituted the pathos of unification and "struggle with the old world" in the official Soviet culture of the 1920s-1930s. The literary material allows defining images, motifs, interpretations and ways of island landscape mythologization. Solitude, silence, holiness, virginity and uniqueness make a set of motifs to shape the image of the Kizhi of the period, often opposing it to the vanity of the modern world. The literary representation of the island in this period often employs the already-existing mythology of historical legends and local folklore. The specificity of the island landscape and history, mostly the architectural ensemble of the Transfiguration and Intercession Churches, is shown in the Sixtiers' texts as explicit and implicit Christian motifs, which rather unusual for the literature of the Soviet period. The semantics of the island as a special place, "another world" is very important for the formation of the Kizhi image. The archaic, folklore semantics of the island as of a place of miracles, reinforced by the literary tradition, becomes immediately evident as soon as the Kizhi island becomes popular. As a result, in the late 1960s the Kizhi island is no longer perceived as an ordinary geographic location: for the mass consciousness it is a symbolic topos, "poetry".

Keywords

Authors

References