Reception of Charles Baudelaire’s work in the poetry of Igor Severyanin

The paper considers Igor Severyanin’s approaches to the retransmission of Charles Baudelaire’s creative heritage in his lyrics. In the late 19th - early 20th century, there was a surge of interest in the works of French symbolists and their predecessors, especially to the fate and literary heritage of the author of “Flowers of evil.” Severyanin addressed Baudelaire’s poetry later, at the turn of the 1910s, referring both to his original texts, and translations and critical articles by his older contemporaries (V. Bryusov, F. Sologub, Viach. Ivanov, Ellis, Andrej Belyj, etc.). The analysis covers the peculiarities of this second-wave “Baudelairianism,” its differences from senior and junior symbolists’ apprenticeship, namely, the ironic game involving both the image of the “pariah poet” and some of the key themes and motifs of his poetry. In 1909, Severyanin begins mastering Baudelaire’s style by translating his sonnets, but later these, not being entirely successful, are ironically reinterpreted and published in the collection “Poesoantract” as purposeful parodies. Another version of the reception is presented in the poem “Sextina” (1910). Weaving a web of verbal puns, the Russian poet inscribes himself in the Pantheon of the famous rulers of doom, while destroying Baudelaire’s tragic aura and placing himself in the vacant place of the poet persecuted by public opinion. Thus, the Severyanin’s reception is seen to reveal the evolution of premodernist and modernist cultural codes being a part of the mass discourse, ironic distancing from them, and their loss of philosophical and ideological foundations. A conclusion is drawn that the deferential attitude to Baudelaire’s legacy is due both to the change in the readers’ perception in general and to the Severyanin’s aspiration for new avant-garde poetics.

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