Metarealism of Alexey Parshchikov and Arkady Dragomoshchenko: Similarities and Differences

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the similarities and differences between the poetic systems of the major metarealist poets Alexey Parshchikov and Arkady Dragomoshchenko. Both poets left very favorable reviews about each other. Despite belonging to the same literary movement, these poets are different, though united by contact communications and typological convergences. A comparative analysis of Parshchikov’s and Dragomoshchenko’s poetics reveals the following differences: the verse form; the corporeality of Parshchikov’s poetry, with visualization tending toward tactility (the representation of visual images from the eye to the hand); the cinematographic nature of Parshchikov’s texts; Parshchikov’s humor as a means of reducing pathos; the principle of ‘neutralization of the word with the word’, Dragomoshchenko’s passive return of things to the world; abstract landscape in Dragomoshchenko’s poetry; the similitude of Dragomoshchenko’s lyric poem to the essay; Dragomoshchenko’s alternation of the poetic and prose; baroquepoetic thinking of Dragomoshchenko; Dragomoshchenko’s diffuse complex of Buddhist and Hindu motifs. The commonality of the authors’ poetics is created by: metametaphor as a constant; the manifestating nature of poetic works, their metalyricism as dominants; the poet as hearing, not voicing; ideogram; implicit connection of phenomena and objects; weighty value of the poem; conceptually complicated syntax; inclination toward emptiness as a space of bliss; portraying the outside as the inside. The power that determines the correlation of objects and phenomena and directs them to a metaphysical continuum, close to an incomprehensible absence, is also largely due to the corporeality of Parshchikov’s writing. The poets converge each other in terms of typological similarities (V. Zhirmunsky’s term), contact connections, and genetic relationship. Between them was personal sympathy, correspondence, and communication. Among their sources of creativity there also were common ones, for example, interest in the ‘American language school’ – strong for Dragomoshchenko, moderate for Parshchikov.