Suicide (Emotionalist's Notes)" by Vitaliy Ryabinin: Futurism vs Acmeism

The article considers the poem "Suicide (Emotionalist's notes)" by Vitaliy Ryabinin, a Far Eastern poet. It aims to show that Ryabinin simultaneously belongs to Futurism and Acmeism, that he is the successor of the traditions of both Vladimir Mayakovsky and the late Nikolay Gumilyov with his "surreal" images and motives. The methodological basis of the study is determined by the unity of the historical and literary, phenomenological, comparative and structural approaches. The material for the study was Ryabinin's poem "Suicide (Emotionalist's Notes)", Mayakovsky's lyrics, Gumilyov's poem "Suicide" and the surreal ballad "With the Gypsies". The article analyzes the Futurist and Acmeist "roots" of Ryabinin's poetry. The title "Suicide" that Ryabinin uses repeats Gumilyov's early poem of 1907 from the Romantic Flowers collection. The texts are close mainly at the level of the title and some motifs. If in the somewhat Symbolist plot of Gumilyov's ballad the female character drinks poisoned wine and falls on the carpet "trembling" and hearing "different sounds", Ryabinin's character pictures many options for his own death. Ryabinin's text is not "pretty", it lacks the ballad-like tragedy. The rhythm and surreal imagery of Ryabinin's "Suicide" echoes Gumilyov's ballad "With the Gypsies". The four-ictus dolnik, sometimes turning into an accentual verse, is characteristic of the late Gumilyov lyrics. The characters of Gumilyov's and Ryabinin's poems exist simultaneously in two layers of being: in the ordinary world, which is vulgar and dirty, sometimes in the most literal meaning, and in the mystical world (in Gumilyov's ballad) and in the spiritually intense state filled with suffering and torment (in Ryabinin's poem). The heart becomes an indicator and symbol of this surreal tension between the worlds. The heart beats, which create the "torn" rhythm of both poets' poems and somehow explain the mosaic of images and motifs sometimes overlapping or diverging in opposite directions. The study has shown that, in his poem, Ryabinin creates a kind of a motif net, like vessels and capillaries, and other images and motives move along the net. This reveals the poet's Futurist and Acmeist orientation. The objectified metaphors, the density of the world revealed in the word, allow spaeking about the diversity of Ryabinin's poetic tastes, about his ability to show the world as complex, symbolic, and transformed. The main motto of Futurism, "Words-in-Freedom", when it is not authors who control the form of their works, but words themselves, can also be seen in "Sui-cide"-a text that leads the author "from the cranial prison" to freedom.

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