One Hundred Years of Nikolay Gumilyov’s “The Lost Tram” in the Reflection of Russian Analytics

The article deals with the problem of a literary text’s existence in the culture space and the variety of its interpretations generated by the characteristics of the text as an aesthetic whole embodying the meanings of various types and eras. The aim of the article is to analyze all the ways of reading Nikolay Gumilyov’s poem “The Lost Tram” proposed by domestic and foreign researchers for the hundred years of its presence in Russian and world literature. The study was carried out on the basis of forty sources: research articles, critical notes and memoirs of contemporaries. These texts were published at different times; they are partially combined, partially autonomous and, in their totality, represent the prevailing direction of philological thought, which does not lose its relevance and needs a generalized comprehension. The main research problem was the classification of the material, which was investigated using methods of semantic and thematic analyses. The latter suggest that, within each text, keywords related to the poem and methods for their semantic filling are identified. The study includes several stages: (1) collection of texts for analysis; (2) identification of specific objects in the texts (nominations, images, key motifs, linguistic traits, intertextual connections of the poem) and methods of their interpretation (types of reading, evaluation and conclusions made on their basis); (3) classification and combination of objects and their interpretations from various texts; (4) designing of a general model of text perception. As a result of the work done, it has been revealed that all ways of perceiving the poem can be divided into four types: the text as a self-sufficient object, as a component of the poet’s creativity, as a component of the literary process, and as a component of the cultural process in the broad sense of the word. The listed types have inventories of specific art forms. In the first case, textual characteristics are proved to be important from the standpoint of a general stylistic assessment, in particular, its understanding as a mystical and symbolic-Acmeistic synthesis. In the second and third cases, the intertextual connections of the poem inside and outside the poet’s works are exposed. The interaction was found with 33 Gumilyov’s texts and 16 texts of different domestic and foreign writers. In the fourth case, the key characters and symbols of the poem are described: “tram”, “Mashenka”, “carriage driver”, “executioner”, “heads of the dead”, “flying horseman”, “India of the Soul”, “zoological garden of planets”. The numerous versions of these images vary broadly from analogies with the real facts of the poet’s life to his broadcasts of a spectrum of esoteric ideas. At present, no consensus has been reached on any of the interpretations; their number remains open.

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