Pagan and CHRISTIAN In RHYME of Vasiliy Shukshin «It was for a long time…»

Vasily Shukshin's poetic texts, as well as his entire prosaic heritage, have always attracted interest of readers,experts on life and creativity of the writer. However, in private opinions of experts this rather small part of his literary archive occupieda definitely peripheral position; if low estimations to this sort of texts were not public, they still existed. Meanwhile, there evolved anecessity in critical revision of the settled positions and in new view development on this question. The author of the article analyzesthis revision by example of a little-known poetic work conditionally named by its first line "Eto bylo davno" (It has been long…). Shukshinknew the tradition and practice of spells, which showed in his works. Thus, the assumption of the fact that Shukshin's poem containselements of a religious text as a result of connection of the church and folk archaic representations is not groundless. The importantelements for the poem's symbolism are death and revival; and the basic model here is not only the obvious Christian one, but also thearchaic: folklore elements of the Russian (wider - Slavic) pagan world with its epic plots about the slaughtered athlete and obvious parallelsto the calendar ceremony. Thus, the connection in the creative consciousness of the writer of several semantic layers creates anoriginal effect: further stratifications that complicate the understanding of the poem enrich the artistic value of the product, preserving itsintegrity. In the article the symbolism of Shukshin's poem is analyzed. The conclusion about the interpenetration of the Christian andpagan (archaic) motives within one syntagmatic whole is made. As the research has shown, V.M. Shukshin's poem is difficult to interpret, demanding application of various tools, frequently untraditional for standard commenting. Nevertheless, it leaves an impression ofinternal concentration, integrity and unity. Meanwhile, high degree of submergence into the olden time along with relaxed usage of arather synchronous cultural context (in particular, modernist searches of the beginning of the 20th century, the epoch fruitfully employedby Shukshin's undeveloped poetics) allows speaking about the value of the poem. In the conclusion of the article it is stated that thecomplexity of the text of the poem can be interpreted as his primitiveness, and its structure as the defective one. Such interpretation isnot surprising: Shukshin's text must be assigned to the class of literary phenomena in Russia, which attempted to break the limits ofexisting norms and traditions by using totally new poetic forms based on the most archaic designs and language orientations. The mobilityof borders between the simple and the complicated in such a paradigm of the text is the balance factor, and constant overcoming ofthese borders creates a dynamic model of perception. Shukshin as an artist of the middle of the 20th century to a greater degree subjectedto changes, transitions and shortcuts (often provocative from the point of view of the dominating cultural representation of thattime) demonstrated some avant-garde principles of organization of the text material in his undeveloped poem.

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