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Abstract: The article examines the socio-cultural, biographical, and aesthetic contexts of the early works (1953–1958) of Gennadiy Aygi. Along with the first publications in the Soviet press, sections of early poems in the poet’s collections and materials from Aygi’s archive at the University of Bremen are also included in this analysis. Previously unpublished texts by Aygi are introduced into scholarly discourse for the first time. The study allows arguing that the author’s conception linking the publication of the first poems in Russian with the year 1960 needs to be reconsidered. As far as it can be judged from the archive materials, there were also experiments of auto-translations and writing certain texts in Russian earlier than this date. Aygi retrospectively corrected the history of his own literary development in order to present the transition from Chuvash to Russian as a one-time event and to link it to the inclusion in the context of ‘uncensored culture’ and the development of avant-garde traditions. In reality, the situation was more complicated: the languages in the poet’s creative consciousness were divided functionally, and switching from one to the other was not irreversible; the early poetic experiments were connected not only with the historical avant-garde but also with the themes and poetics of the Soviet literature of the ‘thaw’; aesthetically and intonationally, the first experiments in Russian were very different from the author’s style of the 1960s and 1980s, which implied restraint, meditation and ciphering. All this prompted the poet, taking into account the circulation of early poems in samizdat, to include some of them in the main text corpus – but in extracts that exclude the idea of the contradictory nature of his early work and the multidirectionality of the benchmarks associated with it. The historicization of Aygi’s poetic work allows the researcher not only to restore the poet’s connections with the literary communities of unofficial Moscow and Leningrad in the 1950s and 1960s but also to relate him to other social circles – the circle of the Literature Institute, in particular, as well as the Soviet official press. This allows for a more stereoscopic and historically accurate picture of the young poet’s literary debut and entry into the context of various literary structures.

About the author(s) :

Alexander A. Zhitenev

Voronezh State University (Voronezh, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6365-4138

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 27.02.2025; date of publication: 30.06.2025

References:

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