Vitaly Ryabinin’s “Japanese watercolors”: genre and stanza experiments

“Exotic” themes, extremely popular in art at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, craving for “foreign,” for extraordinary travels to Africa, India, the East, determined not only the properties of plot-motive complexes in literature, painting, and music but also the features of genre structure of the Silver Age works. In his microcycle “Japanese watercolors” from the poetic book “Melody-trill chords,” the poet V. Ryabinin operates with lyric genres (sonnet, romance) and stanza forms (sextins, hexameters). Stylized genres and stanzas reveal the author’s technique and show classic solid forms in a new aspect. The poet uses Japanese names (“Niavari,” “Nipu,” “Kitamura”), immerses the reader into the world of Japanese words and images (“Harakiri,” “Arigato,” “Geisha,” “Sayonara,” “hasivar”), mentions geographical names (“Fujiyama,” “Sumidagawa,” “Kurisan”), and even composes the poems in the hokku (haiku) genre. These are exactly “watercolors” - the poems combining the richness of tone, dense and bright construction of space, and “black and white” graphicality of images and motives. To emphasize this protuberant solidity, “sketches” are placed in strict forms. Thus, from “drawing” to “drawing”, from text to text, the reader moves in the world of Japanese shadows created by Ryabinin. “Watercolors” are an attempt to comprehend the colors and shades of the Japanese soul by a European - sometimes in a European manner, using “Western tools.” From the oriental genres, the poet chooses only the hokku, and the rest of the poems are created in terms of European classical forms, the Japanese theme entirely penetrating the cycle of “Watercolours.”.