The Kingdom of Dream by Igor Severyanin: a utopia or a parody?

Ibe purpose of this article is to analyze the correlation of the utopian imagery of the symbolists and of Igor Severyanin. The material of research was the poetic works of the poet created before the revolution of 1917. The main research method is comparative-typological analysis that studies pairs of the most representative texts. The article puts forward and proves the thesis that the utopian poems by Severyanin have a dual lyric-ironic nature: they express the idea of a different being, a wonderful life transformed by the laws of art, but on the stylistic level they parody symbolist works with that topos. This allows to determine a number of stylistic devices characteristic for Severyanin's works as parody In the study, the author starts from the fact that the creation of literary and philosophical utopian projects was a current trend in the Russian culture of the 19th-20th centuries. Images of a fairyland, the kingdom of dream, the "golden dream" in one form or another are present in the poetry of symbolism (K. Balmont, F. Sologub, V. Bryusov, A. Bely, etc.). Severyanin also has a very developed topos of the "kingdom of dream" or Mirrelya (he was often referred to as its "singer"). Such common motifs were noted by the contemporaries of the poet (N. Gumilev, K. Mochulsky) and by later researchers of his works, e.g., by S.A. Viktorova. But the very nature of the evolution of the modernist utopian topos in Severyanin's poetry, the mechanism of his assimilation and transformation of the earlier poetic tradition have not yet been thoroughly analyzed, although some observations have been made (V.N. Alfonsov). The main markers of Severyanin's game use of the symbolist utopian images and an ironic attitude toward them are specific artistic means to which he resorts in these writings: the poetics of paradox, absurdity and ambiguity, the stylistic mixture of "high" poetic and colloquial prosaic words, exaggeration and hyperbolization of images, etc. Researchers of parody, e.g., VL. Novikov, characterize such techniques as belonging to the arsenal of the genre of literary parody. The key findings on the comparison of the poetics of Severyanin and of the symbolists are that his "Mirrelya", his "kingdom of dream", is a collective grotesque exaggerated image of the utopian projects of his older predecessors. He did not develop their utopian search in terms of content, but parodied their main themes and motifs. The "kingdom of dream" of Severyanin exists primarily on the level of style and avant-garde poetics, but it is already detached from the utopian worldview and philosophical spirit of the time of the turn of the 20th century.

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