Toskapo mirovoj kul'ture and Civilisation de I'Universel: the poetical concepts of Africa and world culture in Acmeism and Negritude. Part 2

The article contains 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 Ethiopiques by a French-speaking Senegalese poet L.S. Senghor and the cycle The Tent by the Russian modernist N.S. Gumilev. The second part of the article focuses on the main provisions of the Negritude philosophy by Senghor, which aims to demonstrate the value and strength of the "black culture" and its key concept of "Civilization de l'Universel" ("universal civilization") that reconciles African and European constituents. It serves as the background for the analysis of the system of images in Ethiopiques, presenting the identity, being and memory of the "Blacks" and thereby encouraging them to fight for their present and future. The texts in this book have a songlike character, acting as ritual spells, saturated with prophetic pathos. Particular attention is drawn to the cycle "L'absente" ("Absent"), where the main character epitomises eternal femininity, a mythological symbol of the change of seasons, eternal Africa and the Queen of Sheba. Her image is closely connected with the image of the singer, who is an odic poet and a folk performer at the same time. Touching the spirit of the "Absent" for him is similar to touching the "African" fundamentals. Similar to the "Civilization de l'Universel", Senghor's "L'absente" chronotope contaminates the signs of European and African nature with their connotations of absence and presence respectively. The author emphasies the colour symbolism in the cycle, where green and gold - the symbols of Senegal - dominate. The final part of the paper summarizes the similarities and differences between Gumilev and Sengora in their approaches to the representation of Africa, which go back to the colonial discourse and are aimed at integrating African culture into the global culture. Both refer to the African mythical past, appealing to similar figures and pretexts. Their poetic cycles are based on the poetics of intertextuality. In both works, the lyrical I and the author are in almost symbiotic relations. Both poets designate Africa as the paradise opposed to Europe, striving to give Africa its own voice, endowing it with attributes of deity, wealth and remoteness. With all this, for Gumilev, who implements Acmeist attitudes, Africa is an image of absence, pushed into the wildness of the past, into a poetic myth. In Senghor, Africa is presence; marked by harmony and perpetual cyclicality (return) that solders the mythical past and the African present, giving hope for its rebirth. Thus, "yearning for world culture" of Gumilev and Mandelstam and the "universal civilization" by Senghor, Acmeism and Negritude, raise similar problems associated with the modernist transformation of the colonial discursive elements in the image of Africa.

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