Vsevolod Nekrasov’s poem “And I mean the Cosmic” in the context of 1959

The article considers V. Nekrasov’s famous poem “And I mean the Cosmic” with its title-final complex, which was finalized half a century after the first publication of the text, as an example for conceptualist “provocation of contexts”: the title sounds a rejoinder in a dispute, and the date indicates a particularly close relation of the work to the time of its creation – 1959. The article focuses on the specifics of the influence by the “cosmic” excitement of 1959 on the figurative structure and themes of the works of those Soviet poets of the “older” generation, whose work Nekrasov valued – Martynov and Svetlov. It is suggested that one of the realized pretexts for Nekrasov’s poem could be Voznesensky’s “Parabolic Ballad”. The connection between Nekrasov’s poem “And I mean the Cosmic” and the time of its creation is apparently not limited to opposition to official rhetoric; the connection is not exclusively polemical, but of a more complex nature.

Vsevolod N. Nekrasov, “And I mean the Cosmic”, almanac “Syntax”, Leonid N. Martynov, Mikhail A. Svetlov, Vladimir I. Uflyand, Andrei A. Voznesensky, metaphor in the language of the Russian poetry, Thaw era, the USSR space programme

1. Sukhotin, M.A., Commentary on “Hercules”, available at: https://philology.hse.ru/vnekrasov-archive/hercules (Accessed 30 May 2024).