“Poets” and “Rulers” in B. A. Sadovskoy’s Works

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the images of “rulers” and “poets” in the artistic world of the works of Boris Alexandrovich Sadovskoy, a Russian literary figure of the first half of the 20^th century. It is noted that these images go through the entire writer’s fate of Sadovsky, representing himself in different genres of his work - poems, essays, novels and existing in them as a stable motivic complex. The novelty of the study lies in the actualization of the artistic meanings of the figurative dyad in a number of works of the writer (“Polezhaev,” “Bloody star,” “Kings and poets,” “Holy reaction,” “Wheat and tares”), showing, on the one hand, the conservatism of political and state beliefs of Sadovskoy, and on the other - his radically changing value orientations in the perception of the spiritual and aesthetic potential of the national classics. Stoic creative position of the writer, who was finally formed in the early 1920-ies, determined the mission of the Russian artist by his strict subordination to the “authority of the Church,” the only one that does not allow the transformation of art into temptation and preserving the spiritual integrity of the Russian state. In the light of this position the images of Russian poets of the first magnitude are presented as the carriers of “corrupting ideas”, that is considered in the article in the analysis of the last novel by Sadovsky “Wheat and tares.”