‘It was me who walked past myself': subject uncertainty in Oleg Grigoryev’s poetry

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.4-20.064   

Bokarev Aleksey S.,

Candidate of Philology, Senior Teacher of the

Russian Literature Department

Ushinsky Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University 

e-mail: asbokarev@mail.ru

The article addresses the subject field of the poetry by Oleg Grigoryev, an outstanding representative of the literary underground of the late 20th century, in respect of a relation between ‘I’ and ‘Other’. Proofs are supplied that the hero’s awareness in his verses is linked by dialogues with that of the author as a single interpersonal entity, while the border between the role-related and autopsychological lyric poetry becomes problematic. This process results into a specific subject uncertainty emerging from a weak differentiation between texts ‘for children’ and ‘for adults’, multiplicity of in-role embodiments of self determined by a single thinking pattern and by virtue of perceiving the world as a syncretic whole embodied in motifs of dualism and metamorphism. A detailed analysis of verses ‘The Hors’ (‘Loshad’’), ‘The Wire’ (‘Provoloka’), ‘The Soul’ (‘Dusha’) and others makes it possible to show specific ‘mechanisms’ of formation of subjective uncertainty, i.e. transformation of ‘the individual’ into ‘the collective’ and ‘another’s’ into ‘my own’. In the system of coordinates established by O. Grigoryev, each ‘partner in life’, be it a child playing in the courtyard or a neighbour queuing up for alcohol, is perceived as a mental equivalent of self, while recognizing oneself in ‘Other’ (or ‘Other’ in oneself) becomes a steady plot drifting from one work into another.

Keywords: O. Grigoryev, primitivism, subject structure, subject uncertainty, ‘I’ and ‘Other’, dialogue-based relations in lyric poetry.

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