“POETOGRAPHY” BY MIKHAIL PANOV

In this article we describe the unique experience of the philologist and the poet Mikhail Victorovich Panov (1920–2001)? Who had investigated the Russian poetry with scientific and artistic methods. He has created a specific scientific and artistic work — the poem “Starry Sky”, which consists of one hundred poetic miniatures written in vers libre and depicting the artistic worlds of the Russian poets of the 18th – 20th centuries — from Antiokh Kantemir to David Samoilov.

The poem begins with the poetic portrait of Velimir Khlebnikov and is concluded with his other portrait. The avant-gard language and verse of this poet was the prototype of the poetics of Panov. Panov does not use nor quotation neither stylization. His metaphorics is various and unpredictable. The portraits of the poets created by Panov have the self-contained artistic significance and in the same time are the facts of the literary science. The genre of the poetc miniatures by Panov is near to the essayistics and from this point of view joins to the cultural context of the 20th century as the age of the essayism. The “poetography” worked out by Panov as a form of the scientific and artistic representation and investigation of the individual poetic systems is productive for the contemporary philological culture.