Baratynsky and Krivulin: in the shadow of Kjetsaa's book

G. Kjetsaa's monograph Evgeny Baratynsky: Life and Work became one of the models for Krivulin in constructing the image of the poet of Samizdat. In his meta-novel Shmon [Shakedown], Krivulin depicts the twists and turns of this book in the Soviet Union as a collision between the emergence of a new type of authorship, independent of official institutions, and a new type of search for imaginative material, which requires not just circle connections, but a special intuition in the heterogeneous complex environment of the underground communities. This book's interpretation of circle conduct, journal practice, and ideological conflicts proved crucial to the interpretation of the literary tradition of the 1970s and the break with the Sixties neo-avant-garde. In his critical publications of the 1970s, Krivulin consistently constructed an image of the crisis poet according to Kjetsaa as a supposedly central figure of Leningrad Samizdat: one who rationally summarizes his/her own and others' activities, who creates an explanation of the current cultural situation that is shared by all talented interlocutors, who operates with quotations to ensure the selection of material in his/her journal practice, and, finally, who practices a strict division of responsibilities in a journal of the coterie type. Significantly, the endorsement of quotation as a creative principle as opposed to romantic expression and zaum' applies not only to literature, but also to the visual and plastic arts, and here the lessons of Baratynsky as presented by Kjetsaa partially determine not only the theory, but also the artistic practice of Krivulin, in particular the description of the art objects in his poems. Separately, we consider Kjetsaa's conceptualization of the image of the hero in Baratynsky's lyrics as combining the romantic adventurer and the classical chosen one, which influenced Krivulin's particular use of images of mythology and ancient history.