“Cradlesong” in K.D. Balmont's poetry: on the transformation of oral-poetic genre in Russian literature

The article is written in the framework of fundamental research on historical continuity of different epochs in the literature, specifically, tackling the questions how a folklore poetics is manifested trhough an individual author’s creativity, what is its ideological significance, its influence on the formation of an image of a human in literature. The goal of the paper is to define the character of K. D. Balmont’s reception of folklore experience in the genre of a cradlesong in order to elucidate the pathways of an evolution of folklore forms at the turn of 19-20th centuries. The scientific novelty of the research consists in focusing attention on a specific genre of folk poetry, which has become one of the ways for Balmont of reproducing the author’s picture of the world, representing a complex synthesis of an idyllic world of daydreams and reverie, namely, a childish serenity and a volatile reality, concealing many unpredictable turns and trials. The paper’s body represents an analysis of means and pathways of the cradlesong oral poetic genre transformation in the oeuvre of Balmont (the motif of sorrow of life, the motif of a deep penetration of a child’s fate into the soul of a lyric hero, the method of trans-semantization of a call “sleep”, “fall asleep”, the inclusion of a light-sound and olfactory imagery, and the expansion of a semantic area of a cradlesong into other spheres of life). The research results show that a productive assimilation of a folklore tradition was determined by characteristics of the cradlesong genre itself, its universalism, allowing to express a profound philosophical content of the world and the human essence in a concentrated but accessible, outwardly simple poetic form; it was also determined by Balmont’s propensity toward perceiving and creatively revising the surrounding reality through the prism of images and motives specific to the genre of a cradlesong.