“Not a muse, but my life”: on the lyrics of Lydia Chukovskaya

Lydia Chukovskaya’s poetry is an important but still unexplored part of her creative legacy. The article reveals the distinctness of Chukovskaya’s lyrics in relation to the context to which the poetics of her poems bears reference to. The material of the study covers poetic texts of 1938-1995, documentary (“The Dash”) and diary prose. The comparative analysis is performed on the basis of motive semantic, structural rhythmic, metaphorical, and compositional levels of the verse. First, the general principle of organizing Chukovskaya’s lyrical plot is revealed. As the comparison of Chukovskaya’s poems dedicated to her executed husband (“M.”) and Nabokov’s poems (“Execution”, “Spring”, etc.), which are similar in many respects, has shown, the lyric event is created by the enumeration of details, organizing a suggestive rhythm. However, the worlds depicted by the two poets are opposite: Nabokov’s luminous paradise and the irresistible hell in Chukovskaya’s poetry. In her poems, the personal theme is inseparable from the social one; the documentary fact reaches the height of the lyrical sound. Furthermore, we study the poems of Chukovskaya, dialogically related to the poetry of Mandel’shtam, Khodasevich (“In Typhus”, “Tashkent Roses”), Zabolotsky (“I also Wanted to Write ...”). The contextual analysis reveals the dual nature of the reception: belonging to the tradition of “high lyricism” and at the same time concerning a dispute with this tradition, manifested through the use of antithesis. The antithesis has a metatextual significance; in Lydia Chukovskaya’s lyrics, metaphors and symbols, the motive and syntactic organisation of the verse, its very meaning and structure point to the principle we term “prosaization”: “not a muse, not a lyre, but my life”. And this is another striking feature of her poetic discourse.