“Mysterious is soul's labor...” (Aleksey Avdyshev's philosophical lyric poetry)

The article deals with the lyric poetry by a Petrozavodsk poet Aleksey Avdyshev, who perceived the world through a philosophical system of ideas about the world and people. The aim of the article is to contribute to the endeavors of contemporary Russian literature studies to scientifically elaborate and theoretically recapitulate the patterns in the development of the XX century Russian literature as a single process with its own sources, growth stages and development prospects. To this end, the author has previously written and published a series of reviews on ‘Northern' poets (N. Klyuev, A. Ganin, A. Yashin, N. Rubtsov, V Morozov, Yu. Linnik, V Ustinov, B. Chulkov, S. Chukhin), which is now continued by a study of A. Avdyshev's philosophical lyric poetry. It is for the first time in Russian literature studies that the works of this author are analyzed from such a perspective, revealing how art development in the European North of Russia is defined by spiritual-cultural and ethnic factors on the one hand, and demonstrating the inner unity of the literary process throughout Russia on the other. The demand for this study is associated with a currently growing role of art in fashioning a harmonious individual and in patriotic upbringing. Avdyshev's personal experience of interactions with time, nature, or the beloved woman, his reflections on himself, his fate, an artist's mission and obligations are analyzed. The profoundly subjective nature of A. Avdyshev's love verses makes his poetry akin to the works of such Russian poets as Afanasy Fet and Fyodor Tyutchev. Although the poet intentionally stays within the bounds of his personal field of vision and is loyal in his verses to explicitly confession-like grounds, the hero of his lyrics, while cognizing the world, feels the urge to make his point on the past events and an assessment of what was and is happening in Russia. The idea of the ‘return to nature' has to do with the concept of poet's immortality as the perpetuation of a person's life by their deeds. One of the forms of the ‘return to nature' was Avdyshev's pursuit of ‘simplification' through living in his countryside house on Kizhi Island, next door to famous Russian monuments of wooden architecture, and being engaged in ordinary village routines. The very fact of the nature's eternal life is conceptualized by the author as the proof of the proposition he favored so much - that the nature is the original form of existence, which rebuilds the integrity of the human personality. In Avdyshev's verses, life appears as a perpetual process of development and renewal, sometimes incorporating a stoppage of one's inner life to purify the soul: “Mysterious is soul's labor, / its dead-end alleys are beyond count” (“We live in anticipation of a miracle.”). The poet's lyrical hero drifts naturally with the flow of real life, sometimes influenced by mutually exclusive tendencies of the reality.