Sacrificial Allusions in the Poetic Structure of Alexander Tvardovsky’s The Testament of a Warrior
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2021.4.640Keywords:
A. T. Tvardovsky, The Testament of a Warrior, Rzhev-Sychyovka Operation, allusions, reminiscences, Dante’s tradition, artistic retrospective, lyrical plans, narrative, strophic registers, meter, rhythmAbstract
This article analyses the first edition of I Was Killed Near Rzhev…, a famous poem by A. T. Tvardovsky, which is significantly different from the well-known version of the work and makes it possible to discover the author’s original artistic idea. The text of The Testament of a Warrior is dedicated to one of the most tragic periods of the Great Patriotic War, the Rzhev-Sychyovka Offensive Operation (1942), and combines two complex lyrical plans marked by different compositional and poetic methods. This deliberate dissonance between form and content only becomes fully interpretable when the researcher employs an interdisciplinary approach to the totality of aesthetic highs at structurally meaningful levels. This makes it possible to reveal bifurcation points in the development of the main theme of the work, self-sacrifice. Despite the censorship and ideological attitudes of the post-war era, Tvardovsky reproduces the “battle background” of the “summer of the bitter year” through the prism of an unknown soldier’s fate, whose image contains Dante’s transcendental features. The complex synthesis of historical facts and cultural associations, which form an affective contradiction in the status of the lyrical narration in the text of the poem, testifies to the emergence of a special lyrical catharsis in the Soviet poet’s work in order to indicate the sacrificial meaning of the Rzhev “plot”.
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