Poetics of chaos overcoming (Eluard's experience)

The poetic practices of avant-garde are considered in the article for the first time as a crisis of discursiveness. During the analysis of this process, the author comes to the some general conclusions. Avant-garde art was a historical consequence of a deep mental crisis of culture. As it took place in the 18th century, the radical crisis of normative-rhetorical consciousness was marked not only by the dying of classicism, but also by the Great French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of romanticism in art. This “avant-garde” of the epoch of that time laid the foundations of the egocentric mentality as a culture of I-consciousness. The turn of the 19th - 20th centuries was marked by the same radical crisis of this individualistic mentality. Of all the kinds of human activity, art reacts most sensitively and sharply to mental crises. The avant-garde “explosion” of the 19th century traditions in painting leads to the rejection of figurativeness. However, as the creative experience of abstract expressionism and, in particular, Guy de Montlaur shows, this opens up other, non-classical ways and possibilities of visual aesthetic activity. In literature, the declaration of war against the aesthetic traditions of the word art leads to the destruction of discoursivity. Many futuristic opuses, texts of “Dada”, “automatic writing” by the surrealists lose the properties of discourse. Surrealism is one of the most significant phenomena of the catastrophic self-consciousness crisis and the personal identity based on it. The article shows one of the ways to overcome this crisis by the example of Paul Eluard's poetry.