E. Lindegren’s Anthology “Mannen Utan Väg” in the Context of the Modernist Poetic Tradition. Article First: The Legacy of Modernism of the Turn of the 20th Century

A series of two articles is devoted to the poetics of a key work of Swedish fyrtiotalism – Erik Lindegren’s anthology “man without a road” (“mannen utan väg”, 1942) – and its role in the development of the modernist poetic tradition. This anthology has not been studied in Russian literary criticism. The fi rst article examines the infl uence of early 20th century poetry on the work of E. Lindegren, the second – the role of the anthology “mannen utan väg”, as well as Lindegren’s critical articles in the discussion in Sweden of the 1940s about the essence of modernism – the “debate on incomprehensibility”. This article examines how E. Lindegren rethinks the previous poetic tradition, making it consonant with the moods of despair and powerlessness in Sweden in the 1940s. The use of T.S. Eliot’s “mythological method” is noted, when references to antiquity and other cultural codes help to organize the chaos of modernity. The anthology’s characteristic techniques are analyzed, including those inheriting surrealism: the form of the “exploded sonnet”, automatic writing, playing with the polysemy of words, an abundance of metaphors and allusions that create a multi-layered text. It is emphasized which features (the complexity of the poems for perception and their pessimistic mood) became the reason for including Lindegren’s poetry in the discussion of the principles of modernism in Sweden. An explanation of the anthology’s poetics is given by Lindegren himself, who saw the goal of creativity as healing society and the poet himself through the objectifi cation of the suppressed unconscious. Both the numerous complex pessimistic metaphors in his poetry and the few simple archetypal images with which E. Lindegren associates the possibility of overcoming the crisis are analyzed.