The role of literature in the preservation and development of cultural identity in the context of Russian emigration of the 1920s-1940s

Russian literature became one of the main instruments of national and cultural identity preservation in the context of Russian emigration of the 1920s-1940s. There are many facts testifying to it. One of the brightest facts was the celebration of Pushkin's anniversary in 1937. The cultural community of emigration needed a solution of the adaptation problem. It was necessary to preserve cultural identity in the context of foreign cultures. They tried to preserve cultural identity in the way of reproducing themes, images, plots of classical Russian literature. One of the problems this way was the spontaneous development of the myth about Russian culture and literature of the 19th century. The myth about national culture gradually turned into a simulacrum. V.V. Nabokov showed this process in his novels The Gift and Pnin. In cultural works of the Russian emigration, literature and theology were focused on supporting the national culture myth. Among works of a similar type in literature, one can mark a novel by I.S. Shmelev, The Nurse from Moscow (1933). The plot of this novel contains allusions to fairytales and a saint's biography. The main theme of the novel is the salvation role of the native Russian culture, which is emblematized in the image of a nurse from Moscow. The native culture protects the heroes of the novel and allows them to save identity wherever they are: in America, in Turkey, in India. There was only a small group of writers who did not support the myth about national culture. They understood the destructive influence of the myth on the further development of Russian culture in the conditions of emigration. V.V. Nabokov, M.I. Tsvetaeva, B.Yu. Poplavskij can be included in this group. The problem of the possibility of creative work without a contact with native culture was the object of debates. For the most part the cultural community of emigration thought that new Russian literature in emigration had no future. Still, there appeared new writers who were successful in the realization of the new types of cultural identity in emigration. The new traits that appeared in the cultural identity of Russian emigration can be regarded as a result of realization of potential variants of identity. The potential variants of identity started developing as a result of contacts with foreign cultures, or as a result of the crisis of identity. One of the most interesting and dramatic cases is poetry by B.Yu. Poplavskij. In his articles and reviews Poplavskij wrote about the stimulation role of emigration in the restoring of traditional Russian culture. At the same time, poetry by B.Yu. Poplavskij presented the process of the formation of a new type of identity. The poet experiments with poetic language, creates new poetry images and metaphors. In the poem "The Imitation of Zhukovsky" B.Yu. Poplavskij came bask to the source of Russian poetry and tried to find a new way for developing. A new variant of identity is connected not with the context of the "national world", but with the context "Russian" as the world of an independent individual.

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