The genesis of a poetic title:
Georgy Ivanov’s poetry collection The Roses
Liudmyla Harmash
Leonid Ushkalov Ukrainian Literature and Journalism Department, H. S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University, Kharkiv, Ukraine; UMR 8224 EUR'ORBEM, Institute of Slavonic Studies, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France.
e-mail: l.v.garmash@hnpu.edu.ua
AGATHOS, Volume 15, Issue 1 (28): 183-198, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10968045
© www.agathos-international-review.com CC BY NC 2024
Abstract: The article is devoted to a poetry collection, The Roses, by Georgy Ivanov. The purpose is to analyze the meaning of its title. The genesis of the image of the rose is revealed. Having considered the evolution of the rose as a poetic concept in Russian poetry of the 18th–20th centuries, we found that the concept of the rose and cross was borrowed from medieval Europe, the poetic rhyme ‘rose and frost’ and the pair ‘rose and nightingale,’ which came from Eastern poetry, were very popular in Russian literature. The last two semantic complexes are actualized in the poetry of Georgy Ivanov. The transformation of the original meanings was caused by the change in the political situation in Russia after the October Revolution (1917). Emigration transformed Ivanov’s poetic world, splitting it into two parts: the beautiful past, preserved only in memory but becoming more and more ghostly, and the present, which the poet did not want to accept. Therefore, Ivanov’s texts actualize the tragic connotations originally inherent in the rose as a poetic symbol but are traditionally balanced by the meanings associated with the images of youth, beauty, blossoming, and love.
Keywords: concept of the rose, poetry book, semantics of a title, genesis of a title, Georgy Ivanov, Russian poetry
Introduction
Georgy Ivanov is one of the most famous poets of the Russian emigration. He was sixteen years old when he made his poetic debut. He became popular shortly thereafter and was included in the circle of such prominent poets as Alexander Blok, Igor Severyanin, Nikolay Gumilyov, and Mikhail Kuzmin. After the October Revolution of 1917, he remained in Russia for several years but in 1922, he was forced to leave his homeland forever and become an emigrant. The second half of his life he spent in France, mostly in Paris. There he worked in numerous magazines as a poet, critic, and prose writer. The editio princeps of The Roses was also published there in 1931. Ivanov highly appreciated this book and once wrote to a journalist: “If you do not know The Roses, you do not know the very core of my poetry” (Kreyd 2007, 112). The first readers were impressed by its uniqueness and originality. Vladimir Smirnov in his article “The White-hot Sense” gave the following description of Ivanov’s poetry collection: “In these new verses, an unknown poet appeared. He is a strict, laconic, with an amazing moralism of despair and understanding of what is beyond understanding” (Smirnov 2011, 11). According to Yuri Terapiano, this book was “undoubtedly the best not only in émigré poetry but also in Russian poetry in the thirties” (qtd. in Kreyd 1993, 115). Ivanov’s book marks the beginning of a new phase in the poet’s work, developing major images and motifs such as stars, radiance, mirrors, emptiness, and music.
The aim of our work is to analyze the semantics of the title of the poetry book. We will try to answer how often and in what context the image of the rose appears in the collection, with what poetic motifs it is associated, and what influence the previous poetic tradition had on Ivanov. We share the opinion of the famous Russian scientist Boris Gasparov, who argued that in a literary text,
Each component, one way or another, either directly or by associative conjugations, that has fallen into the orbit of the work of thought that generates new meanings, does not remain equal to itself and its properties, which can appear in it independently, at the given moment and in the given conditions of the process. Accordingly, the subject of analysis should not be the component itself but its transformation as a motif that inherently belongs to this message, which makes sense only in those unique combinations with other motifs that arise in this message in the process of comprehending. (Gasparov 1996, 6)
Therefore, it is necessary to interpret the image rendered in the title of the poetry book. We consider it as a key element of the poetic system, entering into complex relations with other elements of this system at different poetic levels (grammatical, morphological, stylistic, symbolic, etc.). On the other hand, the multitude of meanings accumulated over several centuries has led to the fact that “the mythopoetic semantics of the rose synthesizes different cultures, poetic traditions, and events, creating opportunities for multidimensional somatization and partial translatability of ‘texts-reflections’” (Zolyan 2020, 57). To begin with, we will traсe what reflections of the semantics of the rose have become relevant to Georgy Ivanov’s book of poetry.
Methodology
The article uses both general research methods (deduction, induction, and comparison) and special methods. The latter includes systemic, comparative-typological, semiotic, and intertextual methods. The use of the systemic method is conditioned by the fact that we consider the cross-cutting image-symbol rose in the context of the poetic book, in the process of its development, as the essential element of the poetic system. The functioning of this image is traced to the material of specific poetic texts by comparing them, correlating them with each other, and identifying their typological commonality so we turned to the comparative-typological method. However, it is impossible to reveal the inner, deep movement in the structure of the literary image if we confine ourselves to a purely external comparison, which led to the use of semiotic and intertextual methods.
Discussion and results
Many of the symbolic meanings that the rose has in Russian literature have developed from several previous traditions. Firstly, this is the idea of a rose that arose in ancient Greece. The rose was a symbol of spring, love, and desire. It was the emblem of the goddess Aphrodite, the embodiment of impregnable beauty since the stem of the flower is covered with thorns. Ancient mythology knew the rose as a symbol of death so tombs were decorated with roses, and the goddess of the underworld, magic, the lady of shadows, Hekate, wore a wreath of roses on her head (Veselovsky 1898, 4). According to legend, the first red roses grew from the blood of Adonis, Aphrodite's lover.
Secondly, the rose is the most important symbol in Christianity. For example, the collection of Catholic prayers is called the Rosarium. In the Garden of Eden, the Mother of God sits surrounded by rose bushes. This is ‘Rosa Mystica,’ as Dante called her in the Divine Comedy (1892).
Ivan Nazarenko, following Boris Poplavsky, points to the continuity of images of a garden and a rose in the last St. Petersburg collection of Georgy Ivanov, The Gardens (1921–1922) and the first emigre collection, The Roses (1931):
The Gardens are an image of an integral being (earthly and metaphorical, similar to paradise), and roses are a metonymic substitution of gardens. They express the discreteness of being, although it retains the symbolism of beauty and love in an incomplete being. (Nazarenko 2018, 17)
In parallel with Christianity, Gnostic teachings developed, in which the rose was associated with the cult of the Virgin Mary and her hypostasis as the “eternal feminine.” The emblem of the rose blooming on the cross was well known in the Middle Ages: it was used by the mystical orders of Christ—first the Templars and then the Rosicrucians.
The Russian Symbolists, who had a strong influence on Georgy Ivanov, were grateful pupils of the ancient and medieval mystics Dante, borrowing and transforming many of their ideas and symbols (Harmash et al. 2019, 494). A striking example is the poem “The Song of Ophites” by the Russian philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov, the book of poems The Rosarium. Poems about a Rose by Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the drama The Rose and the Cross by Alexander Blok. As Pamela Davidson rightly noted,
The fact that the rose was a major symbol in both the classical and the Christian traditions made it an ideal vehicle for the expression of the poet’s syncretic ideal. In pagan antiquity, the rose was celebrated as a symbol of physical beauty linked to the cult of death, and the rose in the Christian tradition, particularly in medieval times, was revered as a symbol of sacrificial love and martyrdom, associated with Christ, the Virgin Mary, and various saints. (Davidson 2009, 29)
In the Middle Ages, the rose was a symbol of the suffering of Christ, and it also became a common symbol in Russian Orthodox culture. In the famous poem by Alexander Blok, written in 1918, a year after the October Revolution, inexplicably for the author himself, Christ in a wreath of white roses appears at the head of a column of revolutionaries:
And so they keep a martial pace,
Behind them follows the hungry dog,
Ahead of them, with a bloody banner,
Unseen within the blizzard’s swirl,
Safe from any bullet’s harm,
With a gentle step, above the storm,
In the scattered, pearl-like snow,
Crowned with a wreath of roses white,
Ahead of them – goes Jesus Christ[1]. (Davidson 2009, 29)
Thus, the meaning of the rose as a symbol of the suffering of Christ is transformed into a symbol of the revolutionary uprising and the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, which the Bolsheviks declared in their manifestos. Therefore, throughout the existence of the Soviet Union, these lines were interpreted as an expression of the absolute superiority of the Soviet system, although the author of the poem was nothing of the kind.
In Russian poetry, the rose has become popular since the time of classicism. The symbol of the rose contained ambivalent meanings. On the one hand, this flower personified love, spring, youth, and the beauty of a girl. On the other hand, it conveyed feelings of sadness and sorrow associated with the separation of lovers and death. One of the earliest poems was Vasily Trediakovsky’s “The Ode to Praise to the Rose’s Blossom” (1735). In it, the poet expresses his admiration for this plant, conveying his impression of spring’s beauty. Similar connotations are associated with the rose in the future. In folklore, they are supplemented by popular parallels between a young girl and a flower, as, for example, in Anton Delvig’s poem “The Rose” (1823):
Rose, you are a rose, a fragrant rose!
You are such a beautiful rose-flower! (Delvig 1959, 19)
In Marina Tsvetaeva’s drama The Jack of Hearts, there is an eloquent note: “Queen of Hearts, 20 years old, blond, Rose”, which testifies to the typical understanding of the synonymy between the words ‘rose’ and ‘beautiful girl’ (Tsvetaeva 1988, 98). In Alexander Blok’s drama The Rose and the Cross, the title and plot of which refer to the Rosicrucians, the main character bears the name Isora, which in Russian transcription hints at a rose. The poet uses this image to hint at the beauty of the fête galante girl. In the early poetry of Georgy Ivanov, there is also an association between a young girl and a rose. She pins a half-open bud to her dress, which serves as a symbol of her youthful beauty and innocence, and erotic motifs (“The marble cupid is sad in greenery // That he has stone flesh” (Ivanov 1994, 14)) remain only in potency. The lyrical hero of the poem is delighted with the early spring and the flowers that he can admire, enjoying the beauty and experiencing the fullness of life at the moment.
In another poem by Ivanov, popular in Russian poetry of the early 20th century Rococo motifs are played up, mostly known from the paintings of French artists of the 18th century. François Boucher and Jean Antoine Watteau were famous for their new genre, fête galante, a category of painting, that depicts figures dressed in fancy dress or ball gowns, flirting, and enjoying nature in gardens and parks. Their main principle is the image of beautiful people in an atmosphere of serene joy and absolute happiness. Ivanov easily and naturally describes the ‘mischievous’ Cupid wounded by an arrow, a young man, and a smiling girl standing next to him, shaded by branches of roses, a symbol of erotic love.
Thus, we see that in Russian poetry, the parallel between a girl and a flower has become habitual, and the rose has turned into a stable allegory of beauty. Most often, this image was included in the ‘rosa virginale’ topos, when the flower symbolized a carefully guarded innocence. Borrowed from the ancient Roman poet Catullus’s wedding song, it appears numerous times in 19th-century Russian poetry. For example, in one poem by Pavel Katenin, an innocent girl is compared to a rose guarded in a garden, where she can enjoy the love of people and the grace of heaven but only until someone plucked it:
A beautiful maiden is like a young rose
Until she, the honor of the gardens,
In their blooms, carelessly resting,
Is saved from flocks and shepherds. (Katenin)
As the scholar Natalia Mazur correctly noted, the topos ‘rosa virginale’ is opposed and, at the same time, complemented by the topos ‘rosa brevis’ (Mazur 2007, 346). From various examples, let us choose the epigram of DmitriiDashkov with the eloquent title “Transience”:
The rose does not shine with beauty for long. Hurry, passerby!
Instead of the queen of flowers, you will soon find thorns.
(Dashkov 1972, 12)
In the 1819 magazine “The Good Intentions” (Blagonamerennyiy), an article by an anonymous author was published, in which the images of roses on ancient tombstones were commented on:
This lovely flower gives us the idea of careless youth, stolen from the field of spring life. The rose, with all its beauty, has always served as a symbol of death or a short life. What could be more decent than this flower, to express the speed with which we pass into eternity: it also shines not very long.
(Anonymous 1819, 9)
It is noteworthy that a few years before this article, the poet Konstantin Batyushkov left in his diary a note about a real girl who died early. Her death is also associated in his mind with a withered rose:
May 1811. I recently found in the Donskoy Monastery, among other inscriptions, one that moved me to tears. Here it is: the girl is not dead; she is sleeping. These words are taken, of course, from the Gospel (Matthew 9:24) and very aptly applied to the girl who withered in the morning of her life, et rose elle a vecu се que vivent les roses l’espace d’un matin...
(Batyushkov 1979, 19)
The synonymy between spring and roses gives rise in Russian poetry to the metaphor ‘breath of roses,’ which sounds in Trediakovsky’s contemporary. Gabriel Derzhavin wrote in the poem “A Walk in Tsarskoe Selo”: “There is echo laughter; There are whispers of streams; // Here are the breath of roses!” (Derzhavin 1956, 46)
Singing tsarina Catherine II in the ode “Felitsa,” Derzhavin calls her “a rose without thorns.” According to Christian legends, roses without thorns grew in the Garden of Eden, and thorns appeared on them after the Fall. The Rose without Thorns was called the Virgin Mary. Thus, the poet emphasizes that love, humility, and mercy are Christian virtues inherent in the tsarina.
In the comic poem “An Invitation to Dinner” (1795), Derzhavin uses a rhyme that later became widely popular:
Dokole ne prishli morozyi,
V sadu blagouhayut rozyi...
Until the frost came,
Roses are fragrant in the garden... (Ibid., 55)
Here two topoi are combined, ‘rosa virginale’ and ‘rosa brevis’, with an emphasis on the latter: roses cannot bloom indefinitely, and their beauty is destined to fade.
The rhyme ‘rose – froze’ was the subject of ridicule by Russian critic Pyotr Vyazemsky, who believed that it was unacceptable to combine incompatible objects in poetry. However, Alexander Pushkin, in his novel Eugene Onegin, was able to gracefully circumvent this prohibition, making a joke out of a banal rhyme, exposing a literary device, and demonstrating the skill of verification:
The frost is already cracking and crunching.
The fields are silver where they froze . . .
(And you, good reader, with your hunches,
Expect the rhyme so take it: Rose!) (Pushkin 1990, 30)
However, even in this case, the connotations of loss and death of a beautiful but very delicate and vulnerable flower are present in the background, reminding us of the rose’s ambivalent semantics and connecting vital and thanatological (i.e., associated with death) motifs. They are reinforced in the poem of the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok “The Ancient Roses...” (1908), in which this rhyme appears at the very beginning:
The ancient roses
I carry lonely,
There is snow and frost,
And my path is far. (Blok 1960, 62)
From the very beginning, a delicate flower is doomed to perish. The lyrical hero is pursued by someone “with a sword on his shoulder,” and in the poem’s finale, the roses will be “aimlessly” trampled in the snow. Symbolist poet Alexander Blok enters into a poetic dialogue with his distant predecessor, the romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov, who refers to the eastern motif of “the nightingale and the rose” in his poem “The Angel of Death” (1831). He sings of “the golden East,” where “the rose, the daughter of heaven, shines.” The poet hopes that there are still places in the world where “peaceful nightingales” can find peace:
Where the day is red like the night and calm,
Where the gloomy warrior does not trample
Their queen, their love is a rose,
And blood cannot stain it. (Lermontov 1956, 56)
However, at the beginning of the 20th century, it became impossible. In Alexander Blok’s poem, the rose is associated with the motif of deathly longing. It symbolizes beauty trampled on and wantonly destroyed by brute force. We can say that Alexander Blok in 1908 predicted what would happen to many Russian poets in a few years when the First World War of 1914 began, and after that, the October Revolution and the Civil War would take place in Russia. Blok’s muse fell silent forever in 1921; his heart could not stand it, and he died. Moreover, in 1922, many Russian intelligentsia representatives would be forced to leave their homeland with the hope of an early return, but, as it turned out, forever.
Pushkin’s humorous rhyme ‘rose – froze’ is used several times (at least twice) by Georgy Ivanov. However, the intonation and mood created thanks to this rhyme are entirely different, even opposite. The young poet managed to get around the illogicality of comparing severe winter frosts and delicate flowers that cannot bloom in winter so their use in the same context sometimes causes bewilderment among the reader. However, in Ivanov’s poem, unlike his predecessors, it is not natural flowers but frosty patterns on the glass that resemble roses:
My window is burning.
Everything in the pattern of an icy rose,
Hello wind, hello sun,
Expanse and froze! (Ivanov 1994, 44)
The poem is entirely written in the spirit of Alexander Pushkin’s winter landscape lyrics, imbued with joy and filled with a state of happiness, exultation, and delight caused by the glittering of ice flowers in the rays of the winter sun.
Ivanov will turn to this rhyme again after many years when he returns to his poetic book, The Roses, not as an author but as a reader and poet who sums up both his work and his life (Harmash et al., 2020). In Ivanov’s new poetic book, A Portrait without Similarities, there are lines dedicated to the roses, in which Pushkin’s rhyme is quoted as if in a mirror image:
Quietly leafing through the roses,
“If only flowers had not been frozen!” (Ivanov 1994, 54)
The second line reproduces a fragment of a famous Russian folk song. Ivanov’s poem turns into a popular proverb that capaciously characterizes a man’s life: everything could be fine but hopes are not destined to come true since unfavorable external circumstances turn out to be stronger and ruthlessly destroy fragile human happiness.
Another poetic figure of the intertext, quite often quoted in Russian literature, was the first line of the poem “The Roses” (1834), the author of which was famous at the time but now little-known poet Ivan Myatlev: “How beautiful, how fresh there were the roses...” (1969). A young girl embodies the poet’s dream of heavenly bliss and a long, happy life but suddenly her life ends, and only a faded wreath of white roses remains on her gravestone. Despite the tragic ending, the balance is maintained between the high spirits caused by the contemplation of the young girl’s beauty, reminiscent of paradise peri, carefree dancing, and frolicking, and the last lines, which report a sudden death; even the last lines sound somewhat detached. The poet calls for savoring the joys that spring brings while not forgetting the well-known ancient saying: memento mori. By the way, Myatlev also does not refuse to use the banal rhyme ‘rose – froze,’ but it carries a specific semantic load here. The poet connects the semantics of the rose with spring, the beginning of a new life but at the same time, he focuses on how fragile it is.
Ivan Turgenev made the verse line “How good, how fresh the roses were...” famous by quoting it in the title and refrain of one of his prose poems. He further reinforced the motif of loss, loneliness, old age, and death by ending his poem with the words, “I am cold... I am shivering... And they are all dead... dead... How good and fresh the roses were...”[2] (Turgenev 1982, 92) However, in Turgenev’s poem, roses mean a person’s memories of an irreversible past. This is a farewell elegy in which regret is expressed for those who are the ears of life. In his poem, the sad awareness of the transience of life becomes the main mental motif, the feeling of physical cold is the bodily motif, and the feeling of all-consuming sorrow is the leading mood.
In a poem “The Classic Roses” (1925) by a contemporary of Georgy Ivanov who was also forced to emigrate, Igor Severyanin, the poet returns to the source, mentioning the name of the author, Ivan Myatlev, in the epigraph. Severyanin’s poem becomes a mirror image of the original plot: it is not a girl who dies but a dead poet. Roses were a symbol of love, glory, and spring but now their meaning turns first into a memory of the past, the homeland, and after that they become a symbol of death in a foreign land:
How lovely and fragrant the roses will be
That my country will throw on my coffin! (Severyanin 2017, 27)
With such a sarcastic reproach to the forever abandoned Russia, the poet ends the poem. The only thing that gets to the poet is a mocking gesture in his direction as an expression of a final farewell and recognition of his talent. Of course, the poet hopes that the reader will have appropriate associations with Myatlev’s and Turgenev’s poems, which will further sharpen the contrast between fresh roses and the coffin in which the poet’s body rests. In 1941, the poet passed away, and these lines were carved on his gravestone.
Georgy Ivanov’s collection The Roses opens with a poem in which the image of roses is mentioned already in the first line: “Over sunsets and roses.” This series of enumerations is continued by ‘solemn stars,’ thus constituting the first poetic paradigm. Further, it will be complemented by such characteristics as “pinkish stars,” strengthening the connection between the images of roses and stars. We also refer to other elements of the paradigm as ‘pink sky,’ ‘darkness,’ ‘night,’ ‘sleep,’ ‘your window,’ ‘desert garden,’ ‘pinkish distance,’ ‘spring,’ ‘icy ocean sorrow,’ ‘wine,’ ‘snow,’ ‘nightingales,’ ‘cranes,’ ‘happiness,’ and ‘death.’
In the opening poem, which consists of three stanzas, the poet places roses next to sunsets and stars. Together, these concepts become symbolic pillars of the poetic world, which is organized vertically. Its lower tier consists of these elements, which are opposed to the concept of happiness placed above them. In a compositional sense, happiness occupies a central position; it is described in the second, middle stanza. All other elements are opposed to it and taken to the periphery of the poetic space, being declared as others. The semantic series others consists of the concepts music, reflection, witchcraft, and world triumph, which are assessed negatively as a cold, endless, and sterile cosmic substance that surrounds the lyrical hero and, instead of everything, is hostile to him.
Roses, which are so dear to the poet, lose their concrete objectivity, turning into something ghostly, surreal, seen in a dream (“this is only a dream in a dream”), in the twilight, in the shining of the stars “over a desert garden,” the lyrical hero sees “roses on your window” (Ivanov 1994, 267). Despite roses and spring – the traditional signs of youth and love – the poem no longer evokes for the reader that feeling of carefree joy and fun that was inherent in the poet’s early works. Here the movement, and consequently, the time, as it were, gradually slows down, freezes (“the swings of the black oars become wider” than before), and the final point in the development of this movement, which becomes the last word of the poem, where it finally stops, is the concept of fate. Thus, the concept of the rose is related to the past, which was left behind. The poet left it, subjecting his path to what he designated as his destiny.
The traditional semantics of the concept rose and nightingale are also undergoing a significant transformation in Ivanov’s lyrics (Harmash 2020, 170). The plot about a nightingale in love conquering an unapproachable, beautiful rose with his singing and even sacrificing his life for this love arose in Persian mythology. It became extremely popular, first among European poets and then in Russian poetry: “When the nightingale saw the wonderful queen of flowers, ‘white rose,’ so captivated by her charm, he pressed her in delight to his chest. Sharp thorns, like daggers, pierced his heart, and warm scarlet blood, spraying from his loving chest, watered the delicate petals of a wondrous flower. That is why, says a Persian legend, many of the outer petals of a rose still retain their pinkish tint” (Zolotnitsky 1913, 17).
In Ivanov’s early poems, the tragic aspect of the love relationship between the rose and the nightingale is absent. However, the poet retains a typical topos—the action takes place in a grove, a forest associated with the Garden of Eden. The lyrical hero playfully asks the question:
“Ah, I can’t guess what I want. // From a rose, a grove, a nightingale. Why does my gaze meet spring without joy?” (Ivanov 1994, 124) but the answer is quite obvious: a rose, a grove, and a nightingale were only attributes of a love meeting; they do not carry a deep semantic load. The lyrical hero himself answers his question: “And in a hurry to hide in the forest with my beloved, I already know perfectly well what I want” (Ibid., 125).
In 1921, the poet again turned to the symbols of the rose and the nightingale. Mentioning the Persian poet Hafiz and calling his beloved the female name of Persian origin, Gulnara, which means ‘like a flower,’ Ivanov gave the poem an oriental character. The lyrical hero recalls a love meeting with a girl under the tent of the sapphire night sky, and he again wants to return there. However, it becomes obvious that this place, “where the abandoned lute waits, where the eternal nightingale sings over the eternal rose,” is irretrievably lost for him. So, in Ivanov’s interpretation, love between a rose and a nightingale, in contrast to the traditional plot, turns out to be mutual, and the tragedy of the lyrical hero lies in the fact that this happy time is in the past. Using the epithet ‘eternal’ to characterize the rose and the nightingale, the poet emphasizes that this plot will exist but only as a poetic figure, becoming more inaccessible in reality.
In the space of The Roses, the characters of this oriental myth will meet only once, and this will happen in the final poem. Before this ‘meeting,’ they will appear several times independently of each other (in total, the poet uses the word ‘nightingale’ four times, and the word ‘rose’ eleven times), which, in our opinion, symbolizes the split in Ivanov’s poetic world, the previous destruction relationship, and, therefore, the inability to be happy. Happiness turned out to be so firmly connected with the past of the lyrical hero, with his homeland, which he left forever, that in the present, all the connections between the elements of his poetic world were destroyed, and the poet admits his powerlessness to restore and reassemble them into a single whole:
Yes, I am still alive. But what do I care
When I no longer have the strength
To connect the whole creation
With the disparate parts of beauty? (Ibid., 258)
When the image of a nightingale appears in the collection for the first time, it appears as a symbol of eternal love. The poet compares the noise of the sea with the singing of a nightingale. This comparison seems somewhat inappropriate since we can easily imagine how different one is from the other: “And it was only rustling about my love, // The Blue Sea, like a nightingale” (Ibid., 259). This dissonance is possibly due to the conflict between love and betrayal, which is the lyrical plot’s essence. Just as in the surf sounds, it is difficult to find a resemblance to nightingale trills. It is also difficult to believe the assurances of the lyrical hero that “there was no betrayal,” but only “eternal love, eternal spring” (Ibid.).
In the next poem of Ivanov’s poetry book, the image of a nightingale is associated with negative connotations. He no longer sings but cries. The concept of love generally disappears from the semantic field relating to the image of a nightingale. There remains only spring, ice, and the fate of either the lyrical hero or the second lyrical subject mentioned in the poem, flying in endless spaces but not named.
Further, the image of a nightingale appears in the poem “January Day. On the banks of the Neva,” which is an intertextual reminiscence of the “Poem without a Hero” by Anna Akhmatova. Ivanov puts the author of the poem on a par with her heroines: Akhmatova, Salome, Bogdanova-Belskaya as Pallada, and Olga Sudeikina. The latter was a significant figure of the Silver Age of Russian culture, being an actress, dancer, artist, and sculptor. In her poem, Anna Akhmatova portrayed a tragic episode from her biography – the suicide of a young officer, Vsevolod Knyazev, to whom Pallada introduced Olga. For Ivanov, it was significant that the action of the poem takes place in St. Petersburg in 1913, in the last year of peace. It was a time that preceded the First World War and the October Revolution in Russia, which radically changed history and forced many Russian intellectuals to leave their homeland forever. In this context, the poet uses future tense verbs but the nightingale’s image as a symbol of love refers to the past, to another life, and to other people, being included in the semantic fields of memory and oblivion.
The classic pair of rose and nightingale will finally meet only in the final poem of the book “All roses that bloomed in the world.” However, the semantic content of these poetic images will radically change, becoming a symbol of the tragedy of all of Russia, “a country forgotten by God,” as Ivanov describes it. And then the poet unfolds this metaphor, emphasizing it with the help of persistent repetition of the words ‘all’: ‘all roses,’ ‘all nightingales,’ ‘all cranes,’ ‘all sails,’ ‘all clouds,’ ‘all ships,’ ‘all names’ (Ibid., 294).
The roses in this poem form its compositional frame, appearing in the first and last lines. Starting with the ‘rose-nightingale’ paradigm, the poem ends with the ‘rose-frost’ one. However, all the images are consistently associated with a delicate rose, symbolizing the fragility of love. It must be protected from merciless trials (‘frosts’), with romantic night dates beloved, with the spring associated with youth, the birth of life, and the beauty of a young girl, which will acquire completely different connotations. They lose their materiality, objectivity as if dissolving before the reader’s eyes, becoming ghostly likenesses of themselves. In this poem, the poet depicts an apocalyptic picture of the end of the world, using exclusively black paint: ‘black coffin,’ ‘black angels,’ ‘black shadow of the Titanic.’ The last quatrain movement is directed exclusively from top to bottom, reminiscent of a disaster film’s slow-motion footage. The poet correlates the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (the lyric subject): the death of one means the death of the other, which is accompanied by the disintegration of his poetic consciousness:
So, black angels slowly fell into the darkness.
So, the Titanic sank like a black shadow.
So, your heart will break down someday,
Through roses and night, snow and spring... (Ibid.)
Conclusion
In this work, the semantics of the title of one of the most significant poetry collections of the outstanding Russian émigré poet Georgy Ivanov were analyzed. Having examined the evolution of the ‘rose’ image in Russian poetry of the 18th–20th centuries, we found out that the concept rose and cross borrowed from medieval Europe, the poetic rhyme ‘rose – froze’ (‘rozy – morozy’), the pair ‘a rose and a nightingale’ that came from Eastern poetry were the most popular at that time. In the poetry of Georgy Ivanov, the last two semantic complexes are actualized. The transformation of the original meanings is due to the fact that after emigration, his poetic world was split into two parts: the beautiful past that can only be retained in memory but is becoming more and more ghostly, drowning in the river of oblivion Lethe, and the present, which the poet does not want to accept, perceiving it as a world catastrophe, disintegration, and destruction. Therefore, Ivanov’s texts actualize the tragic connotations inherent in the image of a rose from the beginning but are traditionally balanced by meanings associated with images of youth, beauty, flowering, and love.
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[1] Translated by Maria Carlson.
[2] Translated by Vyacheslav Chistyakov.