Three Ragtimes by Andrey Voznesensky: Is One of Them a Sonnet?

As a poet who positioned himself as a singer of the NTR, A. Voznesensky early discovered an acute tendency to ecphrasy in his work. As a graduate of the Architectural Institute, he collaborated a lot and willingly with colleagues in his profession: composers, painters, sculptors, theater and film directors, creating works of synthetic, mixed genres, such as poetic statues, verbal and architectural structures, videomes, installations, operas, romances, oratorios and the most popular lyrical songs. In the 80–90s. he wrote three original poems with an unusual genre designation ragtime: “Sonnet (ragtime)” (“there is no sleep...”) (1980), “Ragtime” (“Love the pianist!..”) (1983) and “Forest ragtime” (“Ku-ku — / past time river...”) (1998). One of them, moreover, he mysteriously called a sonnet, although it consisted not of 14, but of 43 shortened verses. In the proposed article, they are analyzed as a cyclic unity, and an attempt is made to clarify the logic of the appearance of such an extravagant genre-strophic definition. In the final, the author motivates it with three main reasons: 1) pun: “sonnet = no sleep”; 2) after the poet translated several sonnets by Michelangelo for D. Shostakovich, the sonnet became the most perfect “way of communicating with heaven” for him; 3) however, Voznesensky handled traditional genre forms of poetry more than freely, modifying them beyond recognition in order to achieve maximum artistic effect.