Andrei Rublev in 20th-Century Russian Poetry: Examples and Analyses

Abstract

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of poems and poetic fragments by twentieth-century Russian poets that engage with the figure of the fourteenth–fifteenth-century icon painter Andrei Rublev. The study aims to show that the scarcity of biographical and historical information about Rublev prompted many poets to fill this gap with meanings relevant either to their own authorial perspective or to the cultural and ideological contexts of their time.

The poets examined in the article represent diverse literary and social backgrounds, including the peasant poet Nikolai Klyuev; the Soviet Orthodox poets Nikolai Rylenkov and Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky; the Sixties-generation poet Andrei Voznesensky; émigré poets such as Lyubov Stolitsa; and the internal émigré Sergei Solovyov, among others.

Particular attention is devoted to the poem Andrei Rublev (1916) by Nikolai Gumilev, a leading figure of Russian Acmeism, as well as to the ideological debates surrounding Andrei Rublev in the poetry of two prominent Soviet poets of the second half of the twentieth century, Varlam Shalamov and Boris Slutsky.