The roles of the “classic” and the seventies in the essays of Olga Sedakova

The article attempts to analyze the poet Olga Sedakova’s essayistic heritage devoted to the comprehension of poetry. As shown in the paper, Sedakova’s judgments about the nature of poetry and its history emphasize two different key roles in which the subject appears. On the one hand, it is the position of a representative of classical art or a neo traditionalist, and on the other hand, the position of a contemporary, representing the seventies generation in the history of Russian poetry. The first position is characterized by an understanding of the unchanging nature of poetry as a place where man and the Other meet, and the history of world poetry as the history of the artist’s breakthroughs to the origins of the poetic. In this role Olga Sedakova in many ways continues the best traditions of Russian humanitarian science of the second half of the twentieth century. The second position is characterized by an ethical division of the generation into “their own” and “strangers”, a subjective view, the division of poetry into uncensored and Soviet, authentic and non authentic. At the same time the circle of “their own” appears to be extremely narrow, and the origins of the fault in the literary process are found far beyond the Soviet period. As shown in the article, this approach to evaluating one's generation is characteristic of the generation of the seventies; moreover, it was from them that the history of Russian poetry stopped trying to give a holistic portrait of the generation. The history of Russian poetry turned into a series of alternative, “circle” stories, which turned into an instrument of literary struggle for the right to represent the historical epoch. The roles of the “classic” and the contemporary in O. Sedakova’s essays are in some cases contradictory. The article outlines the prospects for overcoming this contradiction in order to get a more holistic view of the literary epoch that Sedakova represents.