Beta's poetry craft (B.V. Butkevich's)

The article examines the features of versification of Beta - Boris Butkevich, a prominent representative of the literature of the eastern branch of the Russian emigration (1895-1931). The study is based on poems written by the poet in the 1920s. It is demonstrated that Beta’s poetic system represented a kind of middle line between the poetry of the second half and the end of the 19th century, gravitating towards the poetics of prose, and the poetry of poetic innovators - Bely, Bryusov, Gippius. At the same time, the borderline nature of Beta’s poetic technique confused his contemporaries and prevented them from making fair assessments of the author’s poetic work. As a result, it is concluded that Beta’s versification largely repeated the fate of the poetry of the Russian Diaspora, which found itself at the crossroads of two opposite tendencies - to preserve the tradition of the first decades of the twentieth century, on the one hand, and enter into a dialogue with innovators, on the other. This crossroads in the 1930s would spread to a significant body of poems in Soviet poetry.