Creative Dialogue between Nalbiy Kuyok and Yuri Kuznetsov: National, Ethnical, Civic
Authors: Третьякова Е.Ю. 
Published: May 2024

На материале переводов стихотворений выдающегося адыгского поэта Н. Ю. Куёка (Нальби), выполненных Юрием Кузнецовым, ставится вопрос о творческом методе, объединившем этих двух гениев. Оспаривается идея причислить Нальби к авангардному искусству, Ю. Кузнецова – к модернизму или постмодерну. Плодотворное сотрудничество этих художников с ярко выраженной мифологической доминантой мировосприятия позволяет трактовать их 30-летнее творческое взаимодействие как богатырское состязание поэтов-эпиков. Оба стремились совместить народное начало с восприятием мира как Целого. Пересечение, взаимообогащение категорий «национальное» и «народное» достигло у них объема, разомкнувшего рамки задач литературы XX в. Прослеживая смысловые и типологические связи с произведениями В. Жуковского, А. Пушкина, М. Лермонтова, Ф. Тютчева, И. Бунина, автор статьи показывает, что силы мифомышления привольно совмещают высказывания поэтов разных национальностей и разных эпох.

The main material of the article is translations of poems by the Adyghe poet Nalbiy Kuyok (Nalbi) made by Yuri Kuznetsov in the period from the mid-1970s till the mid-1980s. This is the poem Dance of Tfokotl and more than 10 verses. The studied problem is much broader and concerns the determination of the characteristics of the creative method of poets with a pronounced national and mythological dominant in the worldview. The article refutes ideas previously proposed in literary criticism to classify Nalbi as a representative of avant-garde art and Kuznetsov as a representative of modernism or postmodernism. The fact is that the collaboration of these two outstanding persons did not fit into the genre structure of the lyrics, but was a heroic competition of epic poets. The translations, commissioned by the Sovremennik and Literaturnaya Rossiya publishing houses to introduce the country to the outstanding phenomenon of one of the fraternal Soviet literatures, gave impetus to interaction that grew stronger for more than 30 years. It decisively changed the participants in the creative tandem: it served to abolish the boundaries of individualized poetic styles. Kuyok and Kuznetsov sought and found an opportunity to express the perception of the world as a Whole through the folk elements of language and culture. The mutual enrichment of the categories “national” and “folk” achieved along this path opened the circle of tasks of the 20th-century literature. The article traces the semantic and typological connections with the poetry of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, and Bunin. The author of the article supports the idea expressed by Vadim. Kozhinov in the preface to Kuznetsov’s collection Transplanted Flowers (1990): translations especially convincingly demonstrate the capabilities of the gift of true poets – they show the poetry’s natural ability to absorb what has been said by the many, releasing the organics of the Whole from under the “crust” of ideologies, dogmas, systems. In her theoretical sustantiation of the reasons for this process, the author of the article proves that this is achieved by moving from subjectively formed narratives to a non-verbal (higher and more capacious) epic level of perception. The author concludes that the myth of national culture is capable of absorbing the wisdom of poets of different nationalities and different eras. Such a philosophical and poetic exchange with the classical tradition of Russian literature brings the most striking creative achievements of modern poetry of the peoples of Russia to the level of classics.