Against the background of Hermitage: three notes on Vasily Filippov's poetry

The poetry of Vasily Filippov is difficult to interpret due to the peculiarities of constructing a lyrical plot and lyrical position, and proximity to outsider art. A detailed interpretation of the poet’s three poems from the 1980s shows how external impressions (visiting the Hermitage, reading the news, reading samizdat) are transformed into an understanding of the structure of new culture. Filippov shows a special interest in the matter of reality, in how the material side of events is arranged, which allows him to build the plot as a hidden dialogue and even a dispute about the ways of developing lyric poetry. The article proves that in one of the considered poems, the plot of a visit to the Hermitage and a meeting with another poet allowed to conceptualize technique and technology in art in a new way. In another poem, the story of the vandal destruction of Rembrandt’s «Danae» was transformed into an eschatological concept of St. Petersburg’s destiny for world culture. In the third poem, the experience of reading a typewritten magazine turns into the fact that even the use of this manuscript testifies to the chosenness of the poet. Thus, Filippov’s poetry was the poetry of metamorphosis, in which individual impressions from the surrounding world were interpreted as bodily signs of the poet’s mission, they were read as the necessary suffering of works of art as culture-framed body suffering, so that only the poet, as a participant in the metaphysical element, can save the material world. Such an ecological understanding of the mission of literature was actual in the 1980s, but in Filippov’s works it was dialogical not declarative.