Post mortem: The phenomenon of the image of the living dead in modernist poetry (V. I. Narbut, B. Yu. Poplavsky, B. Brecht, G. G. Maliev)

The paper aims to demonstrate the idea of transformation of traditional artistic motifs in the aesthetics of modernism using the example of the theme of the living dead in poems by V. Narbut, B. Poplavsky, B. Brecht and G. Maliev. The scientific novelty of the study lies both in the broad coverage of modernist texts: Russian literature (V. Narbut), Russian émigré literature (B. Poplavsky), German (B. Brecht) and Ossetian literature (G. Maliev), and in the chosen aspect of analyzing the archetypal plot of the returning dead in the context of the creative principles of art in the early 20th century. For the first time in the history of Ossetian scientific thought, Maliev’s work becomes the subject of a comprehensive literary analysis through the lens of inter-literary connections and influences. The presented poems reveal the ways of convergence and divergence with the traditional perception of otherworldly objects of the afterlife (the deceased, a dead person, a skeleton) in the universe of the individual conceptual sphere of modernist poets. The paper identifies the author’s interpretations of the theme of fear, dying-resurrection and the living dead, where thanatological imagery goes far beyond all the strange and frightening. The fusion of the living and the dead in the presented works is deprived of the terrible, moving into the sphere of hypertrophied naturalism and ordinariness (Narbut), abstract conventionality and fantasy еpatage (Poplavsky), neo-mythological absurdity and political satire (Brecht), individualization of the inanimate, active confrontation of the above-ground world and the underworld (Maliev). As a result of the research, the following statement is presented: the long life of this or that literary motif depends on its semantic multiplicity and possibility of endless interpretations from the positions of both the author’s imagination and the principles of cultural trends and currents relevant at the moment in world art.