Russian Eros: Artistic Implementation in the Poetry of Pavel Vasiliev

Abstract

The article examines the artistic depiction of the act of love and the erotic bodily canon in the work of the Russian poet Pavel Vasiliev as a poetic expression of the Russian Eros. Russian Eros is understood as a separate cultural space that includes ideas about eroticism, sex, love existing in the society, literature, and art. His figurative and aesthetic embodiment in Vasiliev’s poetry was influenced by the artistic worldview and personality traits of the poet and, undoubtedly, by the ideology of his time – Stalinist traditionalism and puritanism. The locus and chronos of lovemaking are shown as events with spatial and temporal characteristics. The reduction of the chronos of intra-event fragments of a love act, the specificity of the locus with specific details (house, room; outdoors; in the hayloft) are considered. The term “erotic bodily canon” is introduced, developing and concretizing the theoretical concept of the bodily canon of Mikhail Bakhtin. The erotically significant parameters of the bodily top and bodily bottom of a woman are modelled, the specificity of their figurative-poetic implementation in the works of Vasiliev, and the connection with folk ideas are described.