The Reception of Russian Classical Poetry in the Works of the Tatar Poet Renat Kharis

The article examines the semantics of religious, spiritual and moral motives in the work of the modern Tatar poet Renat Kharis (b. 1941) in the context of Russian classical poetry (G. R. Derzhavin, A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov). The study of R. Kharis’s translation reception in the translation of the ode “God” into Tatar (2016) demonstrates the difficulty of adequate literary translation of works of Russian sacred poetry based on Orthodox Christian culture into Tatar. In the poems “Reanimation” (2020), “Maryam Anasi Kazan” (“Kazan Icon of the Mother of God,” 2023, translated into Russian by N. Pereyaslov), R. Haris, in search of spiritual and moral values in a contradictory modern society, turns not only to Muslim, but also to Christian discourse, thus enriching Tatar literature and culture and conducting a poetic dialogue with Russian classics (A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, etc.). In the poem “Reanimation,” the poet, actualizing Lermontov’s concept of the soul, recreates the motifs of Russian classical literature. In the poem “Maryam Anasi Kazan” the artistic embodiment of the image of the “Kazan Icon of the Mother of God” allows us to raise religious and moral issues in historical retrospect — through a comparison of Russian and Tatar national images of the world. The methodology of ethnopoetics allows us to examine the reception of Russian classics as “other, different” in the translations and original poems of R. Kharis in the Tatar language, taking into account the spiritual and moral views of the poet that were formed in the context of Muslim culture and classical Tatar literature.