N. GUMILEV’s POEM “DO YOU REMEMBER THE PALACE OF GIANTS...” AS A PRE-ACMEISTIC “ELEGY”

Abstract

The article examines the poetics of N. S. Gumilev’s poem “Do You Remember the Palace of Giants…” in the aspect of genre-modal realization of lyrical intentions of the author’s consciousness. This text, written in 1910 and included in the third book of poems by the poet “Pearls”, explicates the shift of Gumilev’s self-determination from the neo-romantic postulation of ideal reality to the comprehension of the empirical reality of earthly being. The proposed structural-semiotic analysis of the poem shows that the formation of N. Gumilev’s future acmeistic ideas about the interaction of the microcosm and the macrocosm is characterized by an explicit elegization of lyrical discourse. In the plot-building of this text, the collision of the neo-romantic sublime past and the realistically reduced present is brought to the fore, which produces an elegiac orientation of subjective self-determination in the world. The first three stanzas of the poem are the questions of the lyrical hero, addressed to his beloved, in which the mythologized past is actualized and the ideal “landscape” of the former unity of the male and female selves is explicated. The second part of the poem is contrasted with the questions-memories of the first: in its three quatrains, the self-consciousness of the hero and his beloved is represented in the present moment of the lyrical utterance. In the unfolding of the plot, the sacred meaning of the mythological residence of a love feeling is emphasized, which is translated into the register of everyday life and thereby value profaned. It is concluded that N. Gumilev in this poem represents the elegiac self-determination of the lyrical subject, firstly, as a marker of the neo-romantic separation of ideal and reality, and secondly, as a parameter of the value movement of the poetic “the self” to comprehend and accept the empirical essence of the earthly world. At the same time, the elegiac connotations of the plot unfolding of the text, on the one hand, give rise to the ideologeme of the loss of the personal (intimate) “golden age” by the heroes-lovers, and on the other hand, conceptualize the memory of the ideal past as a point of genuine contact between a man and a woman in their mental unity.