The image of the desert in the Shanghai poetry anthology "The Island" (1946)

The subject of the study is the nature of the interpretation of the traditional image in the section "Desert" of the poetry collection "Island" (published in 1946 in Shanghai as a result of the activities of the Friday Circle), the correlation of texts by different poets (among the authors of "Island" were the subsequently famous V. Pereleshin, and poets about whom we know little, such as M. Korostovets or V. Ievleva). The goal of the work is to clarify the ideas about the structural principles of "Island" as an artistic whole. The analysis of the poems, each of which creatively plays with the theme of the desert – one of the ancient and multifaceted motifs – can provide new data for the history of the image, which has mainly been studied in Russian studies using material from other eras, but is also significant for the 20th century. The semantics of the desert in each poem of the section is examined, the relationship with pretexts is analyzed, and the correlation between the works is established. A method of slow reading, comparative and intertextual analysis is employed (especially for the poems of Pereleshin and Korostovets). Before this proposed work, "Island" was practically not discussed as an experience of demonstrating versions of image usage (sometimes – as in the section "Desert" – significant and rich in history). It can be said that the proposed work enriches the material on which our ideas about the semantics of the desert in Russian poetry are built, the set of possible meanings of the image, its history, and its potential uses in the 20th century. In particular, M. Korostovets's poem is presented as a vivid example of the interpretation of the theme of Exodus, important for the self-consciousness of the Russian emigration. Special features in the approach to the desert motif in the poetry of the "eastern branch" of emigration are noted: against the backdrop of the use of the lexeme "desert" in Russian poetry, where it often has positive connotations, in "Island," the desert is understood almost exclusively as a place of suffering, and the associative link between "desert" and the theme of creativity and/or religious contemplation prevalent in Russian poetry is absent (a significant exception being Pereleshin's poem). It is noted that the special (primarily geographical) position of the poets of the "eastern branch" determined the possibility of interaction between the conditional, symbolic meaning of the traditional poetic image and reality, historical, geographical, ethnographic, and such interaction could prove fruitful in an artistic sense: there was a "realization of the metaphor."