Hero of the Asian frontier in Soviet poetry of the late 20s - 30s

The paper deals with the image of the hero-civilizer that appeared in Russian poetry during the establishment of the Soviet system in Central Asia. The research aims to argue that poetical reflection of the modernization on the Southern frontier gave rise to oriental neoromanticism of the Kiplingian type in early Soviet literature. The comparative studies of Kipling's characters and ‘the Bolsheviks of the Desert and Spring' in the writings of classic Soviet poets (Nikolay Tikhonov, Vladimir Lugovskoy, Konstantin Simonov) reveal the typological proximity of the colonial poetics and allow us to identify multiple examples of the direct borrowing of poetic themes, motifs and forms. The ideological superiority over the West was consolidated in Soviet Russia in the early 30s through resurrection of the imperial mythologems. However, addressing the national epic past did not meet the conditions of the ideological struggle in the South-East, which compelled Soviet poets to refer to the colonial poetics of Rudyard Kipling. The neoromantic colonial discourse was manifested through poetry depicting the men of the new ideology - bearers of the new ‘white man's burden' who were civilizing the wild Turkestan. By the early 30s, the combination of the neoromantic style and current ideology produced a specific type of Soviet oriental discourse that was gradually losing its topicality as a consequence of modernization of the Soviet frontier. The Kipling-like model of the firm civilizer, the man of duty, had been seriously corrected by the end of the pre-war decade. It can be concluded that the early Soviet epic ideal of the conqueror carrying out the task of the Party gradually gave place to the paternalistic rhetoric of the protector-liberator.