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Abstract: The article examines one of the little-studied issues – the reception of Yu. K. Terapiano’s poetry in Russian émigré critical thought. The practical research material covers a corpus of lifetime critical essays devoted to his lyric works. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that it synthesizes and interprets the assessments of émigré critics of Terapiano’s poetry – some of which are predominantly metaphorical in nature – for the first time in literary criticism. The study employs the typological, historical-literary and comparative research methods. The undertaken analysis shows that critics, dealing with Terapiano’s poems, generally sought to define the author’s “poetic individuality”. The critical literature can be subdivided into three main groups. Thus, in the 1920s, critics (V. F. Khodasevich, G. P. Struve) considered the works of the young poet an imitation of his predecessors – V. Ya. Bryusov, Vyach. I. Ivanov, and N. S. Gumilev – which, in their opinion, led to a certain fuzziness of the author’s voice. Since the 1930s, the ambiguity of the poet’s individual style was associated with his turn to the genre of the “human document” (M. L. Gomolitsky, V. F. Khodasevich, P. M. Pilsky, A. L. Bem, G. V. Adamovich, and others), which, being hybrid in nature and situated on the boundary between literature and journalism, requires a specific way of reflecting reality. Alongside this, one can notice critics’ interest in the rhythmic-intonational structure of Terapiano’s verse: those critics observed an intonational discontinuity caused by syntactic asymmetry and an abundance of punctuation marks. Particular attention of the critics was drawn to Terapiano’s mixed intonational form, in which song-like verse is combined with regular speech intonation. In the latter, according to Adamovich, the poet’s individuality is most clearly revealed. The analysis of the critical materials allows the author to conclude that émigré criticism not only responded flexibly to the innovations of Terapiano’s poetics but also reflected, to a certain extent, the general direction of the literary process in Russian Paris – its movement from formal search toward documentary-existential truth, and from stylistic experimentation toward intonational expressiveness and rhythmic freedom.

About the author(s) :

Yu Juntаo

Saint Petersburg State University (Saint Petersburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-0678-7702

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 07.11.2025; date of publication: 29.12.2025

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