Beyond ethnic existence. The Erzya poet Alexander Arapov’s artistic world

This article examines the poetic work of Alexander Arapov, one of the most prominent representatives of the modern Mordovian national literature, and explores structural, compositional, and content aspects of his poetry. We have established that his poems are strictly rhymed, and free verse elements are almost nonexistent in his text. This may be due to the fact that the author presented himself as a bard, performing many of his poems to the guitar. The article notes that Arapov’s poems make extensive use of infinitive writing techniques, their frequent use can be explained both by the influence of Russian “infinitive” poetry and by the “Erzya agglutinativeness” of the poet’s linguistic personality. We analyze in detail the motifs and imagery of this author’s poetry, exploring the semantic contexts of the symbols’ artistic actualization of winter, snow, trains, train stations, and silence, as well as the love lyrical poetry examples, illustrating the existential and psychological depth of A. Arapov’s work. In addition to Russian-language poems, our analysis includes texts written by the poet in the Erzya language, revealing their artistic, content, and compositional independence. The article concludes that the most promising aspect of studying Arapov’s artistic phenomenon is a comparative one, involving the analytical approach to the development of the literatures of the peoples from the Volga region and Russia.

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