The Mustache-Caterpillar of Signor Feltrinelli in Andrey Voznesensky’s “Nostalgia for the Present”: Artistic Interpretation of Reality in Prose and Poetry

The article examines an example of the interaction of verse and prose in the context of artistic interpretation of physical reality. The chapter “The Moustache of the ‘Land Surveyor’ ” from Andrei Voznesensky’s book “Nostalgia for the Present” is taken as an object. This chapter is about the author’s meeting with Giangiacobo Feltrinelli, about whom it is said: “A billionaire, a member of the Italian Communist Party, later the organizer of the ‘Red Brigades’ and a demon of terrorism, in Russia he was known as the publisher of ‘Doctor Zhivago’ ”. When describing Feltrinelli’s appearance, the main detail is his moustache; it appears more than once in different tropes and in different spatial coordinates throughout the chapter, and at the very beginning it is compared to caterpillars, which children call land surveyors. And this prose artistic comprehension of physical reality is intruded by a poetic text, created, according to the author, on a plane flying to Italy, immediately after Feltrinelli’s death. Here, artistic prose, intentionally aimed at a memoir setting, that is, at transmitting the truth of life, interacts with a poetic artistic text based on an event from physical reality. In this interaction, there is a mutual semantic enrichment of prose and poetry. The poetic text is necessarily commented on by prose in almost all of its lines, literally explained; prose, thanks to the poem, is aesthetically enriched: an elementary comparison, concentrated in the poetic lines “How mysteriously his moustache darkened, // like a caterpillar-surveyor”, compactly folds into itself all the meanings that in the prose segment were somehow involved in both the characterization of Signor Feltrinelli and in the projection of what happened to him onto what ultimately happened to the author, when, in a difficult time for himself, he suddenly saw a caterpillar-surveyor, which was supposed to promise good luck. As a result, it is concluded that in the general context of Andrei Voznesensky’s book “Nostalgia for the Present”, poetry and prose complement each other in terms of meaning: prose necessarily comments on the poetic trope, but also does this by artistic means, while poetry enriches prose aesthetically, by means accessible to poetry, creating a compact quintessence of all prose constructions.