POETICS AT THE TEA-TABLE ALEXANDER KUSHNERʼS “SUGAR BOWL”

The essay discusses the poet Alexander Kushner’s poem “Sakharnitsa” ([The Sugar Bowl]; 1996) from the point of view of its generic and rhetorical structure and in terms of the system of invariants comprising Kushner’s poetic world . His mode of portraying the “small” objects of everyday life as fraught with rich literary and psychological significance was influenced by the poetics of Innokentii Annenskii and the way it was interpreted in the scholarly works of the late addressee of the poem — the former owner of the sugar bowl in question, the philologist Lydiia Ginzburg. The tradition of “object poetry” is traced in the article to Alexander Pushkin (his poems about a talisman and a black shawl), Mikhail Lermontov (a dagger, a branch from Palestine), Marina Tsvetaeva (her desk), Boris Pasternak (a snapshot of his beloved), Mikhail Kuzmin (a mysterious little item, a cardboard house, Mount Fuji in a saucer), Boris Sadovskii (a samovar) as well as Georgii Ivanov, Vadim Shefner and Joseph Brodsky (about crockery and other domestic objects). The detailed analysis of the Ginzburgian “Sugar Bowl” is supported by the similar structural outline of the poem “Solonka” [The Salt Shaker], dedicated to the item that used to belong to the poet Gavriil Derzhavin, — a much earlier (1966) Kushner poem that exhibits major affinities with “Sakharnitsa”.