Alexei Kulakovsky and tradition: towards the formation of literary poetics

Abstract

The article examines the attitude of the first Yakut poet Alexei Eliseevich Kulakovsky to the preceding tradition, understood in this case in a broad sense. It included both the oral tradition and the foreign-language book literature, the experience of mastering which characterizes the earliest stage of the poet's formation. It is suggested that the poet's attitude to the two different sources for his work was built on the principle of attitude to the "foreign" text in general, whose role was played by both the borrowed book literature and the autochthonous folklore. At the same time, the poet creates his "own" text each time, differing in individual consistency and integral composition. The mechanism of the appearance of the "poetic function" (according to Roman Jakobson) in such a text is considered through the analysis of the A. E. Kulakovsky’s first work published in 1908 – "The Oath of the Demon (Abaasy)". It demonstrates simultaneous innovations in verse, stylistic and narrative plan, and the text itself arises at the junction of the plots borrowed from the Russian literature and the poetic language of "own" tradition. That work already signaled the transition to a literary text, distinguished by its own poetics. The A. E. Kulakovsky’s poetry, as a whole, demonstrats a system of ideas about poetics, which was based on general attitudes of his own literary origin rather than on folklore, which is commonly believed. This was the reformatory essence of the first poet and his poetry: to overcome the tradition and create a new literary type of the text.