The book of poems “Black and blue” by A. Ladinskiy: N. Gumilev's “lessons” and occasional mythopoetics

The article examines the first book of poems “Black and Blue” (1930) by A.P. Ladinskiy, a representative of the Paris branch of the first wave of literature of the Russian diaspora, in the aspect of the creative development of N.S. Gumilev’s poetics. The analysis of the emigrant poet’s poems shows that the inheritance of N.S. Gumilev in his lyrics manifests itself primarily in the conceptualization of the mythologeme of the path as the basis of the ontological self-realization of the lyrical subject. The movement of A.P. Ladinskiy’s poetical consciousness towards the convergence of earthly and heavenly principles is correlated with the search for world harmony, which determines N.S. Gumilev’s artistic worldview. Focusing on N.S. Gumilev’s principles of subjective representation, A.P. Ladinskiy in the structure of the book “Black and Blue” uses a wide range of lyrical masks of the poetic “self’ (admiral, European traveler, Florentine fugitives, crusaders, masons, argonauts, etc.), actualizing certain historical and cultural codes and characterized by a common desire to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual aspects of being. It is concluded that the “lessons” by N. Gumilev, connected simultaneously with the acmeistic attention to the “worldly” reality, and with the neoromantic thirst to comprehend the heavenly-otherworldly world, turn out to be one of the key factors in the formation of occasional mythopoetics in the lyrics of A.P. Ladinskiy. At the same time, the artistic concept of the world in “Black and Blue” is fundamentally different from N.S. Gumilev’s, since in it the strong-willed “self’ of the warrior-traveler comes to the fore not so much as the ontologically vulnerable personality of the exile sufferer. The poetic myth of A.P. Ladinskiy, largely growing out of N.S. Gumilev’s concept of the universe, postulates the ultimate thirst for the unity of the microcosm and macrocosm and the tragic realization of the impossibility of overcoming their antinomy.