"A Night Tearoom" by Rurik Ivnev: in the Mode of a Victim

Abstract

The article deals with the poem The Night Tearoom by Rurik Ivnev (1924), scrutinizing the way the arrangement of sounds, the poetic vocabulary, and the lyrical plot represent the state of passion, insurmountable infatuation, refusal from one’s ego and transformation into another being. The article considers the issue of verbalizing and putting into verse some state, which can’t undergo semiotic translation. For the lyric hero of Rurik Ivnev, the situation of sacrifice for the sake of love is a recurring motif. This plot itself is quite typical of symbolism, where the lyric hero and as the author’s alter ego is a victim or a sacrificer, or combines these two roles. In Ivnev’s verse, love is always shown as culpable passion, an impersonal external force, fully devouring the artist. The lyrical plot is arranged on gradation of feeling, movement to the symbolic death and transformation into a being of another nature - a sacred victim. From the viewpoint of the poetic vocabulary, we observe a conflict between hackneyed metaphors and oxymora. It is the boundaries of clichés and occasional figures of speech, the collisions between differing contexts in small fragments of the text that generate a special effect – breaks in therhythm of language inertia. As a result, perception of reality becomes problematic, answers don’t exist. The most essential point is achieved due to the function of the final paradoxal metaphor. This «striking» finale instigates special perception of the poem, in which two alternate mechanisms function: intellectual tension (the metaphor is based on combination of mutually excluding concepts) and triggering of physiological associations, related to the implicit meaning of the metaphor(execution – blood – death – transfiguration). The creative strategy of Ivnev is characterized by special devices: on all levels of the text clashing things become combined, converge in their unity / juxtaposition, coming to a single point, and induce ambiguous interpretation. Such treatment of language and poetic form demonstrates tension accompanying translation of emotion into the aesthetic sign of a state, which can only be named inexpressible.