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Abstract: Using Ivan Poltoratsky’s poem from the book “33 Units of Greenery” (2023), the author examines the protagonist’s tactile contact with the world, which removes the antithesis of subject and object. Poltoratsky’s poetic vision is seen similar to ecopoetics, but the socio-critical pathos characteristic of eco-literature gives way to a desire to express the eternal harmony of existence. Poltoratsky’s accepting attitude echoes the ideas of Q. Meillassoux, E. Kohn, and M. Yampolsky. The idea of nature’s endless self-reproducing life is expressed in the composition of the book, which comprises 11 microcycles consisting of three poems, each titled in the same way as “Spring”, “Summer”, and “Autumn”. The poem “The Aryk” [irrigation ditch] is a part of the seventh (central) microcycle. The first text (“Spring”) presents the post-war years of Stalinist repression through the prism of Alexei German’s film “Khrustalyov, My Car!”. The generalized social “we” unites both Lev Gumilev and subsequent generations as material for future film scripts, creating their own versions of history. In the central poem “The Aryk”, the protagonist’s concrete biographical “I” returns to the time of the pre-social children’s paradise. The landscape functions as the subject-interlocutor (“you”). The third text (“autumn”) conveys a meditation in which the opposition between the subject and the external world is resolved. Bodily memory, awakened at the moment the character touches the water of the irrigation ditch, reveals the beauty of a world of “fine handcrafted work” and softens the sense of hopelessness, bringing the motifs of light and warmth to the fore.

About the author(s) :

Nina V. Barkovskaya

Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-5937

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 14.05.2026; date of publication: 30.06.2026

References:

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