Poetry as a dictionary

Abstract

Devoted to the poetry of I. Volgin’s later years, the article introduces his two latest books, Personal Data [Personalnie dannye] (2016), and Explanatory Dictionary [Tolkovyi slovar] (2019), and points out the changes in his lyrical poetry in the 2010s. The authors especially focus on Volgin’s language, which admits the latest slang but also follows classical examples, something which typifies the language of modern literature. The ‘new’ Volgin adopts the parlance of his protagonist, a product of contemporary mass media, who is at the same time endowed with certain autobiographical features of a self-reflecting hero. The result of this code-mixing is contagious: rooted in 19th c. culture, it can express both those overtones and the present mixture of seriousness and irony. Most importantly, however, it can read a man’s life like a text, and see nature within a cultural context. In Volgin’s works, these two worlds are mutually accessible, and this feature of his poetry is one of the keys to modern poetry in general.