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Abstract: Interest in eternal images, mythical heroes, their birth, exploits, and journeys continues unabated in the modern world and contemporary literature. Each era renovates and reinterprets the ancient Greek epic, a legacy significant to European and Russian culture. The figure of Odysseus is one of the most prominent images reflected in Russian culture across eras. Odysseus becomes a symbol of struggle with the gods in the poetry of the Golden Age and a symbol of the eternal wanderer in the poetry of the Silver Age. In the latter half of the 20th century, the Odysseus mythologeme is semantically expanded in the “ancient text” of Joseph Brodsky, who portrays himself as an exile, deprived of his homeland. This article examines the transformation of the Homeric myth of Odysseus in contemporary Ural poetry, focusing on the assimilation of the classical heritage by Russian literature, starting with the Golden Age. The practical research material encompasses poetic texts included in the four volumes of the “Anthology of Contemporary Ural Poetry”. The data collected through the analysis of the poetic texts in the Anthology allowed identifying the diachronic development of Odysseus’s image in contemporary Ural poetry. Interest in Odysseus peaked during the crisis of the 1990s, as reflected in Volumes 1 and 2 of the Anthology of Contemporary Ural Poetry. This study employs both conventional historical-literary and historical-comparative methods and new methods of structural-semiotic and mythopoetic analyses. The study demonstrates how contemporary Ural poets adapt the Odysseus myth and integrate it into regional texts steeped in chthonic and infernal mythopoetics. The Ural Odysseus is most often depicted as wandering the realm of the dead. Instead of sunny Ithaca, the eternal wanderer finds himself in snowy, black-and-white Ural cities. In the poetry of Vitaly Kalpidi, a demiurge of the Ural poetic school, the Odysseus myth is embedded within the life and work of the Ural poet. The epic adventures of the cultural hero in the Ural cities are compared to the heroic voyage of Homer’s hero.

About the author(s) :

Evgeniy A. Smyshlyaev

South Ural State University (National Research University)
(Chelyabinsk, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4848-4986

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 07.07.2026; date of publication: 31.10.2026

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