The ballad about a comrade: on the problem of genre refractions of historical memory in A.T. Tvardovsky’s poetry

Statement of the problem. The paper examines the features of the artistic structure of A.T. Tvardovsky’s Ballad About a Comrade (1941) in the perspective of politics and poetics of memory; it is concluded that the historical poetics of the ballad deeply corresponds to the goals of commemoration that the poet set for himself. The purpose of the article is to consider the Ballad About a Comrade in the historical retrospective of the genre, to compare the work of the 20th century with the precedent texts of the classical period, to show the continuity of Tvardovsky in terms of the canon, as well as its discrepancies dictated by the early Soviet era. Methodology. The work is carried out at the intersection of several productive analytical approaches - historical poetics, genre studies as its component, modern studies of the commemorative aspect of culture. Research results. In the Ballad About a Comrade by A.T. Tvardovsky, the structure of the ballad’s dialogue-role triangle is modified. While maintaining the functions of the world order (the war front) and the mobile hero (a wounded soldier, whose image can be traced back to the dead soldier of the ballads on the plot of Burger’s Lenore), the position of the hero making a fatal choice has been significantly changed. In this case, the choice of the heroine is dictated rather by an epic-heroic task and cannot qualify as self-affirmation in the spirit of tragedy.