Sonnet-Medallion by Igor Severyanin “Shmelev” as a Remeyk of “The Sun of the Dead”

Medallion of Igor Severyanin dedicated to I. S. Shmelev, is a poetic analogue of his tragic saga “The Sun of the Dead”. Igor Severyanin visited Crimea twice: in March 1913, and also in late December 1913 – early January 1914. It was four years before the civil war  that caught him in Estonia, the citizen of which he was destined to become and where he ended his life in 1941, having denounced it with a paraphrase of the poem in prose by Turgenev: “How fresh, how beautiful will be the roses that my country will throw upon my tomb!” Therefore, we can confidently conclude: in reality it was the “blooming” land that appeared to his eyes, but in his sonnet he recreated the picture of the world, displayed in “The Sun of the Dead”, and it with his personal impressions. Inevitably, active intertextual links were to be established between the two works, enriching both texts. The analysis of the expanded system of epithets of the Severyanin sonnet (“blooming Crimea”, “nature stunned by people”, “human freedom”, “indifferent sky”, “dying living <people>”, “mocking sun shone”, “sun of the dead”, “evil dragon as if from Sologub”, “everything was rude in golden laughter”, “there was death in every window”, etc.) convincingly confirms this assumption. On the one hand, almost all of the epithets are generated by a clear poetic element of Shmelev's frenzied prose, on the other hand, they also reflect the creative individuality of the poet, who seemed to be very far from the author of “The Sun of the Dead”. As a result, the resonance of two unique artistic systems formed an expressively intense and synthetically-complex extremely polysemantic intertext.