REREADING THE WORKS OF MARI SOCIALIST REALISM: THE ARTISTIC PHENOMENON OF EVRIK ANISIMOV

Abstract

The article examines various aspects of the artistic world of the Mari poet Evrik Anisimov, who is little known to a wide range of readers. His work is interesting because it reflects the most important historical events that befell a person born in the Soviet Union. Poetic comprehension of these events doesn't proceed smoothly, linearly and in the same aesthetic, ideological and emotional key. In the course of a long life, the Mari poet witnesses a catastrophic realities and consequences of the Great Patriotic War, disintegration of the country and the destruction of ideals. He had to live and create, adapting to new alien ethical paradigms and cultural parameters. E. Anisimov's poems have a wide problematic and thematic range, and are characterized by text-forming interaction of “modes” of memory. The diverse psychological contexts of Anisimov's poetry are valuable from a literary point of view. The revealed numerous situations of physical and mental traumatization of the lyrical subject, apparently, can be regarded both as an objective result of life during the war years, and as a remarkable ethnopsychological feature of the Finno-Ugric ethnophor. The “spheres of absence” are also significant. The poet does not actualize the plots of love communication, does not express his ethnic identity, that indicates the mechanisms of internal filtering and censorship that work even after years. The artistic phenomenon of E. Anisimov is a complex reality that includes the reflection and repulsion of the Soviet model of the world, socialist realist rhetoric and the author's sense of the tragedy of Soviet history and everyday life. Ideological attitudes in his works either collide or implicitly coexist with the awakening creative freedom, memory is “complicated” by the perception of modernity, heroism is combined with vulnerability. Our attention to the system of poems by Evrik Anisimov shows that the time has come to re-read Mari socialist realism.