Lyrical miniatures by Grigory Petnikov: historical and cultural context

Tsaregorodtseva Svetlana Sergeevna ORCID: 0000-0002-2510-2324 PhD in Philology Associate Professor of the Department of History of Journalism and Literature, Moscow State University named after A. S. Griboyedov. 111024, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, shosse Entuziastov, 21 alatas@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Pogodina Yuliya Yur'evna PhD in Philology Senior Lecturer, Department of Foreign Languages and Professional Communication, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation 125167, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Leningradsky Ave., 49/2 yypogodina@fa.ru

 Currently, an impressive layer of research has been accumulated on the Crimean period of Petnikov's life, which allows for research on the vital biographical and historical-cultural context of his work.

In 2019, a monograph by A.D. Timirgazin about Grigory Petnikov was published, written on the basis of archival materials from the collections of Literary and Artistic materials of the Literary and Art Museum (Old Crimea), the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine (Kiev) and other sources ^[1]. Much attention was paid to Petnikov's work in the almanac of Crimean museums "Crimean Penates" (2006, 2010), where detailed articles about his poetry by A.A. Bachinskaya, P.V. Konkov, A.D. Timirgazin, memoirs of M. Petnikova's daughter were published. 

According to Galina Babak, "in the history of the Ukrainian and Russian avant–garde, Petnikov is quite a significant figure. He was at the same time close to the circle of Ukrainian writers and artists – Mike Johansen, Yuri Platonov, Mikhail Dolengo, Maxim Rylsky, Dmitry Zagul, Mikhail Semenko, Boris Kosarev, Alexander Beletsky – and Russian futurists – Nikolai Aseev, Velemir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burlyuk, Bozhidar (Bogdan Gordeev), Boris Pasternak, Elena Guro" [2. – p. 198].

Indeed, Grigory Petnikov occupied an important place in the literature of the Silver Age, adhering to moderate futurism with his word-making and the desire to find new genre-style forms in poetry. In 1914, together with poets Bozhidar (Bogdan Gordeev) and Nikolai Aseev, he founded the publishing house "Liren" in Kharkov, which until 1922 published books and collections of futurists with their aesthetic protests against old art and ideological and political views directed against the World War.

 In February 1916, when the First World War was going on, the Russian futurist poets declared war on the war. They created a Great Time government. Utopian international "Governments of the Globe" (other names — "Government of poets", "Society of Chairmen of the Globe", "Society 317"), which was proclaimed in Moscow. Velimir Khlebnikov was elected the first Chairman of the Globe, and Grigory Petnikov was elected the second. According to the plan developed by them, there should be 317 Chairmen in the Great Government, since according to Khlebnikov's Theory of Numbers, all events taking place in the world, changing in time, become multiples of three hundred and seventeen."...If we understand humanity as a string, then more persistent radiation gives a time of 317 years between the strokes of the string... 317 years is not a ghost.., invented by a sick imagination and not nonsense, but the same weight as a year, a day of the earth, a day of the sun: I want the sun and the vein of my hand to be joined by a common tremor" ^[3] .

In 1918, V. Khlebnikov, in the poem "The Appeal of the Chairmen of the Earthly, called on the Society of Chairmen to realize the creation of a State of Time living in the undulating rhythm of the cosmos. In 1918, G. Petnikov wrote "Poems about the war of 1914-1918", naming the causes of the war and its scale:

And the age of the sword, and the age of the new axeFloating over the European night,

And volleys of six - inch guns

The veils of hypocrisy are being torn to shreds.

Petnikov in his poem ironically wrote about the patriotic slogan "Victory to the end" and showed those interested in the war: a group of people enriching themselves at the slaughterhouse.

Such a world order, according to the poet, is established where war brings profit:

In the offices of banks and military warehousesThe profit is being calculated.

But in the "suburbs of poverty" another account is always kept: not profits, but the dead.

Showing the injustice of the war, the poet predicted "the high flame of young uprisings."

The movement of the Presidents of the Globe had a certain resonance, their number was replenished in Moscow and St. Petersburg, musicians, artists, pilots, foreign figures of culture and science joined it. After the death of Velimir Khlebnikov in 1922, the movement of Chairmen actually ended.

In the early 60s, Grigory Petnikov was reminded of the title of the Second Chairman of the Globe by his student, the young poet Leonid Vysheslavsky, in the article "Attention: the Chairman of the Globe speaks!" ("Uvaga: the Head of the Earth Speaks!"), which was published in the Ukrainian literary newspaper on November 16, 1962. After this publication, Petnikov sent a letter to Vysheslavsky from the Old Crimea, in which he gave his student the title of Chairman of the Globe.

Grigory Petnikov spent the last years of his life (from 1958 to 1971) in the Crimea.  The Crimean period of creativity coincided with the poetic boom in the USSR and was marked by great poetic activity of Petnikov, the renewal of the genre nature of his poems.  

During these years, collections of his poems were published in Simferopol — "The Cherished Book" (1961), "Morning Light" (1967), "Lyrics" (1969), "Let the poems work" (1972).

Publications of new collections of Petnikov's poems were highly appreciated by critics - articles by A. Makarov, V. Medovnikov, P. Degtyarev, V. Kravets, L. Varlamov, A. Belekov, L. Alekseev and others were published in Crimean newspapers. On the 90th anniversary of the poet in 1984, Krymskaya Pravda responded with an article by Pavel Degtyarev "The Poet of Pigeon Vision", in which the author of the anniversary publication noted that the "Cherished Book" is an appeal to readers after many years of creative "stagnation", when Grigory Petnikov was engaged exclusively in translations.

In the "Cherished Book" ^[7] Petnikov included poems from his early collections: "The Life of Shoots" (1918), "The Growth of the Sun" (1918), "The Book of Mary-Light the Snow" (1920) and a new cycle of poems "Open Pages".  Almost all the poems in the collection of the "Cherished Book" are dated.

Here is a quantitative list of three "old" cycles by the years of creation of poems:  1915 – 1916 – 5 poems (hereinafter art.), 1917 – 1918 – 7 art., 1919 – 1921 – 6 art., 1922 – 1923 – 5 art., 1924 – 1925 – 4 art., 1926 – 1927 - 2 art., 1928 – 1929 – 2 art., 1930 - 1931 – 3 art ., 1932 -1933 – 9 art., 1934 – 1935 – 5 Let's give for comparison a quantitative list of poems from the new cycle "Open Pages" by the years of creation: 1942 – 1st art., 1951 – 1st art., 1953 – 1st art., 1954 – 1st art., 1955 – 3rd art., 1956 - 5th art., 1957 -1 art., 1959 -3 art., 1960 – 8 art.

The internal organization of the collection with the division into two parts of "old" and "new" poems allows you to compare the structure of the "Treasured Book" with the Bible. The allusion supporting this rather bold statement is contained in the very title of the collection, as well as in the fact that the Bible falls under the genre definition as a BOOK. Thus, both words in the title of the first Crimean collection correspond to the Book of the Old and New Testaments.

Similarly, the collection "Lyrics" (1969) is constructed, consisting of a cycle of "old" poems: "The First notebooks" and the cycle "Ash", which also includes "New triplets" of 39 "new" miniature poems.    The release of the collection "Lyrics" did not go unnoticed in the Crimea. On January 21, 1970, the newspaper "Crimean Komsomolets" published a note by the Moscow architect M. Ushakov, who noted that "new" and "old" poems  Petnikov is united by youth. Indeed, the motivational roll calls of "new" and "old" poems in this collection are obvious. 

However, the novelty of the "Lyrics" is explained, first of all, by the fact that this collection included poetic miniatures, which was new for Soviet poetry of the early 70s, but was characteristic of the literature of the Silver Age. For example, the influence of Japanese poetic miniatures on the work of K. Balmont has been well studied^[4]. According to Yu . Orlitsky, the Russian poetry of the beginning of the century was influenced by Alexander Globa's cycle "Flowers of someone Else's Garden" (From Japanese poets) ^[5] and the study of the famous orientalist V. Aston "The History of Japanese Literature" ^[6], from which Russian readers first learned the features of the poetic miniaturist Matsuo Basho and other Japanese poets.  Many Russian poets of the beginning of the XX century have experiments in creating a haiku and a tank. Among the Russian poets who became interested in the traditional genres of Japanese poetry were V. Bryusov, A. Bely, K. Balmont, M. Kuzmin, O. Cheremshanova, N. Zakharov-Mansky, D. Burlyuk, G. Petnikov, etc.

               Interest in the poetic miniature was manifested not only by the young "lyrical" ^[1] futurist Petnikov, but also in his later work, when the poet's three verses were published in the book "Lyrics" ^[8], about which he wrote in one of the poems:

I have scattered the seeds of new words:They, having ascended, about our time and about affairs

They will tell you with passion.

Most of the poems are landscapes, which is very typical of classical haiku:

Spring: oh, how many vowels!

I raised my head: Ah! The swallow is sitting on the wire.And we exchanged glances with her.

I write green on blue.

And gray.And I stay away from the paths, there are so many suns blooming.

And – at the top – they are already flying – flying!

Japanese haiku excluded humor – Petnikov has humorous miniatures.

To my gate – in the morning - in the crackTwo children 's eyes looked in:

And on this good day, the jasmine bush bloomed.

There are mournful poems, extremely concise, with breaks of rhythm, slowed down in time (reception of retardation) and in the appropriate mourning range of colors:

Copper funeral pipes. And clods of half-frozen earth.Funeral move: red banners

In black ribbons.

Semantically multilayered poems with antique motifs characteristic of the literature of the Crimea, bright coloratives and an unusual sense of time are especially interesting:

I write green on blue. And – alom.And meeting my Lydian hour, I see –

How Eros holds the Earth on his shoulders.

               Moreover, this is a clear modernization of the motive: instead of the Atlanteans, the Earth is held by the young god of love – Eros. The treatises of G. Petnikov are built on associative connections, they require careful reading. An equally interesting concept in this poem is the Lydian hour, which is often found in Petnikov's late mythopoetics. Mythopoetics is always allusive, it consists of analogies and reminiscences that refer to important natural or cultural constants – to well-known places, times, legends, obvious and global concepts for everyone.

               In this triplet, Petnikov writes about Lydia, one of the most brilliant states in the history of the earth, ruled by the fabulously rich Croesus. During the heyday of his country, he did not listen to Solon's words that wealth is not a guarantee of happiness. It is believed that the first coin was cast in Lydia. But the main thing for the poet, apparently, is something else – the dizzying freedom of love and Lydia's erotic cults. In the "long" poem, Petnikov no longer writes about the Lydian hour, that is, not about time, but more precisely sets the spatial vector:

I visited the Lydian region again, -How to describe it?

Rather, how can I tell this feeling?

This is the hour in wonderland,

So close to me,

When I entered the protected forest

And plunged into you,

As in the cup of a flower,

Or flying towards you, I was flying away from you

The movements of the coil and curl…

Love is the Lydian dream of the poet, which comes "accompanied by a dream", it is an immersion "as in a cup of a flower" in the land of hidden memories.

        In the mythopoetics of the Crimean period, Petnikov refers to ancient Lydia, like Voloshin, who created the mythical   Cimmeria, or A. Green, who created a fabulous Greenland (from the cities of Zurbagan, Lil, Gel-Gyu, poetic Capernaum). Such a fairy tale in reality, a lost paradise, became for the poet Grigory Petnikov  Lydia.

               Semantically, the beginning of the poem is also multilayered: "I write green on blue. And – alom."

               Moreover, this is not the only miniature with such a beginning. Most likely, this is a chronotope, indicating time (sunset or dawn) and place (sea and sky), but red icons, red horses on Russian icons, and Petrov-Vodkin's red horses are remembered, and all this is already the past for readers of the thaw, but it is memorable for the poet who began writing in the era of the Silver Age.

               In the 60-70 years, Petnikov writes about the new time, and the symbolism of color is different for him and invariably his predilection for the green-blue scale:

On a gray stone is a green princess. Green light.

And the horse is green. And my bugler with a blue trumpetOpens the morning.

               Why does Petnikov write green on blue? Perhaps because he is the Chairman of the Globe, and as the creator creates green is a symbol of nature, blue is the sky and the sea.

Living in the Crimea, in the last years of his life, summing up creative results, Petnikov wrote in the mainstream of neoclassicism, but he continued to search for the perfect form of verse. He was still attentive to the word, engaged in word-making, especially when he created poetic miniatures.

I have removed almost everything from the poems –Tired snow.

And sadness. Slowed down time.I left only you – like music - the way to the top…

In this triplet, the poet "fixed" the formula of the poetic miniature, determining what should be in it, and what the poet "cuts off" as superfluous.

Having improved the form of lyrical miniatures, Petnikov introduced a lot of new things, not only in the form, but also in the content of short poems. Based on historical and cultural allusions, he gave semantic layering to lyrical poems, following the aesthetic attitudes of the Silver Age, Futurist linguistics, Russian and Ukrainian folklore, ancient mythology.

^[1] Grigory Petnikov was called a lyrical futurist by A.I. Beletsky.