Toskapo mirovoj kul'ture and Civilisation de l'Universel: the poetical concept of Africa and World culture in Acmeism and Negritude. Part 1

The article is devoted to a typological comparison of the principles of artistic construction of the image of Africa in Acmeism and Negritude. The subject of comparison is the book Ethiopians by the French-speaking Senegalese poet L.S. Senghor and the cycle The Tent of the Russian modernist N.S. Gumilev. The first part of the article outlines general similarities and differences between the two authors in their approach to the representation of Africa. If Senghor formulated his basic poetic principles in a pronounced anticolonial spirit, as an African influenced by a colonial project, Gumilev knew Africa only as a traveler and acted as the heir to European colonial discourse. Meanwhile, the two authors not only wrote about Africa, but also created a general poetic idea of the continent, which reveals a cartographic character in Gumilev's interpretation and looks like a cultural concept of an essentialist property in Senghor's. The second part gives a detailed analysis of the figurative system of The Tent. The cycle is united by the central motif of Africa, with each poem dedicated to a separate part of the continent. The descriptions of African nature go together with references to its culture. The poems deeply immerse the reader in history and related plots, often constructing (quasi-) mythology of recreated landscapes, regions or cities. Thus, in Damar, the poetic mapping is supported by the myth of world creation from the body of a giant bird singing praises to God. It gave birth to African peoples and Europeans who must return their lost integrity. The poem is also full of signals of oral and written discourses. On the one hand, the image of Africa in The Tent reflects ambivalent tendencies of exotisa-tion, primitivisation, and accent on savagery characteristic of the colonial-imperial European attitude. These tendencies are found, for instance, in the poem "Equatorial Forest", describing a Frenchman's death in the jungle, with parallels to "Heart darkness" by J. Conrad. On the other hand, the modernist aestheticization of African nature and ancient culture strives to merge with the lyrical Self. This Africa epitomises the Dionysian ecstatic pleasure, expressed in exotic poetry and images of past cultural development, including the mythological stories about the origin of the Christian Orthodox Church of Ethiopia ("Abyssinia"). Particular attention is drawn to the ways of rapprochement between Africa and Russia through intertextual references, Christian mythology and figurative analogies. Reflecting "the other", The Tent creates an encrypted image of unattainable Russia, comparable to the paradise and sacred land, inspired by tendencies of contemporary avant-garde poetics connected with the interest in the mythical past of Africa.

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