“Red Tomatoes” by B. Chichibabin: the poet’s path and the possibilities of the poem

Abstract

The article presents a comprehensive semantic, poetological and contextual analysis of the poem Red Tomatoes («Кончусь, останусь жив ли…») written by the Russian poet Boris Chichibabin with consideration of debatable aspects of existing interpretations. The significance of this creation for the poet’s personal and creative formation has been specified. The interpretation of the poem’s key symbolic image has been amplified, and a real comment has been attached to it. Archetypical, folkloric and literary pretexts of the poem have been characterized. The correlation between the external, biographical and lyrical plots has been commented on. The semantic load of all formal components of the poem, such as composition, verse structure, phonics, and metrics, has been checked up. It has been shown that the poetic construction appears to be nearly the only support in a torn, hostile world, in which a prisoner found himself; at the same time, along with a classic verse structure, the poet uses non-classic metrics – a fuzzy three-ictus accentual verse, thus demonstrating the possibilities of a “free” poem.

The meeting points of Chichibabin’s poem and the “semantical poetics”, created by Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, have been detected (such as the understanding of the connection between history and a person, infusion of creation into life, turning words to deeds, relatedness of a poem to a real-life situation, prosaic character of the poem, combination of the generalized and philosophical notions with the specific and sensual ones, etc.) The prosaic character of the poem is reflected in the introduction of the elements with a plot, hidden dialogue, the use of colloquial intonations, playing with tenses, as well as the cinematic hints.

The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the poem written by young poet signifies not only his young creative maturity but also a special poetic intuition – while revealing an enhanced semantic character of all the elements of the poem and implementing the performative possibilities of the poetic expression, Chichibabin’s text correlates with the perspective artistic discoveries of post-Symbolistic epoch.