Autobiographical aspect of Vadim Bayevsky's Poems of two millennia

The article analyzes the autobiographical aspect of the lyric poetry of a Smolensk literary critic and writer V. S. Bayevsky using the example of the book entitled Poems of Two Millennia. The relevance of the proposed research is due to the insufficient study of Bayevsky’s creative heritage, as well as the lack of analysis of his poems from the autobiographical perspective. The purpose of the work is to study the peculiarities of the autobiographical principle manifestation in Bayevsky’s lyric poems. Biographical, cultural-historical, and comparative methods were used for the research. The analysis led to the conclusion that the autobiographical principle is embodied in the plot, at the level of the system of images and processing of life material. This allows us to recreate real personalities (from the sphere of science and literature), as well as autobiographical and historical episodes. Bayevsky’s lyric poetry is characterized by fixation or providing documentary evidence for what is written, which is manifested in the indication of a specific place, “autobiographical space” and time. The poems reflect Bayevsky’s archival heritage (letters and diaries), through which it became possible to reconstruct the situation of communication between the writer and his addressees. The lyric poetry, which contains autobiographical elements based on documentary evidence, has a confessional nature similar to that of a diary. Thanks to literary subtexts and stylizations, the lyric poems acquire generalized character.