On the artistic singularity of unfinished Nikolai Nedobrovo's poem “The smouldering lace”

The article is the first one to analyze “The Smouldering Lace”, an unfinished poem by Nikolai Vladimirovich Nedobrovo (1882-1919), Russian poet, philologist, and literary critic; Alexander Blok’s peer at the St. Petersburg University, and a friend for many figures of the Russian Silver Age, including Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Anna Akhmatova and others. Andrei Bely highly appreciated Nedobrovo’s poetry between 1912 and 1917 and described him as the “future 20th century Fyodor Tyutchev”. He was also referred to as “Vyacheslav Ivanov’s right-hand man” within their common poetry circle. Nedobrovo was a good friend of Anna Akhmatova. His article on Akhmatova’s early works is considered a conventional one among scholars. She even continued her lyrical dialogue with Nikolai Nedobrovo long after he passed on. This article analyzes Nedobrovo’s lyric poetry, for instance the images of lace and brocade, as well as the images of the past associated with it. A comment on Akhmatova’s poem called “I have always loved the last page of each book...” provides an accurate interpretation of the images of the two houses and the shadow profiles on their walls in this poem. The question of Nedobrovo’s distinctness as a verse theorist and the innovation of his article on meter and rhythm is also touched upon. However, as a poet, Nedobrovo tends to prefer traditional versification over experimenting. In his small poetic heritage, we find samples of the sonnet, Alexandrian verse, ghazal and triolets. The subtitle for “The Smoldering Lace”, “a poem in octaves”, is of special interest. According to the author of the article, this proves the poet’s commitment to the solid forms of verse, which, on the one hand, is generally characteristic of the verse culture of the early twentieth century, and on the other hand, fully coincides with Nedobrovo’s aesthetics and specific artistic design, judging by what was left of the manuscript. The article contains the text of Nedobrovo’s unfinished poem.