V.V. Knyazev and his “Dedy”: transformation of Quixotic motifs

The article presents an original research of V.V. Knyazev’s poetry in the context of his biography and chiefly the quixotic myth of the poet’s grandfather K.N. Vysotsky. The author explores transformation of the quixotic motifs (discord between the ideal and reality; books; sacrificial service, the death of Don Quixote, etc.) structuring the theme of grandfathers in V.V. Knyazev’s poetry (“Dvunogiye bez per’yev”, 1914; “Krasnoye Yevangeliye”, 1918; “Poslednyaya kniga stikhov”, 1933) and prose (“Dedy”, 1934). The integrative research methodology combines a biographical approach with a historical-genetic and motif analysis in its classical form. It was found that the theme of grandfathers (Russian “dedy”) in its biographical and literary aspects is one of the dominant features of Knyazev’s writings in the 1900-1930s making him paradoxically faithful to the “testaments of the past” during the birth and victory of the new world. The unfinished novel “Dedy” is interpreted in the context of K.N. Vysotsky’s quixotic myth as family-related, Polish-Siberian, and autobiographical in nature; the ancestral “moral tenets” equate in the literary work to a human universal. It is shown that quixoticism unites V.V. Knyazev’s characters in different literary periods: from the poor man and the fool to the communard, the prince in exile, the poet - “the Forerunner of Christ Coming in Fire”. As a simultaneously tragic and comic figure, V.V. Knyazev’ Don Quixote is a multifaceted phenomenon: ridiculed in the 1900s-1910s, the winner in 1918, defeated in 1934, while maintaining the main thing - sacrificial service to ideals, including the literary ones with their liberating and resurrecting power.