Egor Letov: breaking with tradition through the perception of Vladimir Mayakovsky

Now that the work of Egor Letov, one of the largest and most profound poets in Russian rock culture, finally was "demarginalized" and the subject is on a par with the study of creativity all of the "established" authors; when in the last five years regularly once a month in Russian State University for the Humanities is held a permanent academic seminar (already more than twenty of them were held), dedicated to the poet and musician, civic and political figure; when the release of scientific papers and books on the vast issues of his work has long ceased to be something outstanding (it is enough to mention "Formulaic poetics of Egor Letov"by Y. V. Domansky, or the number of master's theses dedicated though not entirely to E. Letov), there is still a feeling that we are dealing with an endless source of study. It seems that the possibility of analyzing the correlation specifics of E. Letov's creativity, mainly from the point of view of his avant-garde, absurdist precept, is of particular importance in this regard. E. Letov's work is related to the work of many Russian poets of the twentieth century, futurists and OBERIUts in particular. The identification and interpretation of textual and artistic allusions here are essential both for defining the artistic philosophy of E. Letov and for discovering new meanings in the poems of his predecessors. This article considers this aspect in connection with the work of V. V. Mayakovsky, with which the early work of E. Letov has the maximum number ofpoints of contact.