Somnambulistic (A Wreath of Sonnets by M.A. Voloshin «Lunaria»)

Abstract

Shortly before his death, the outstanding stephanist and stephanologist from Petrozavodsk, Yuri Vladimirovich Linnik, sent me, as the Chairman of the International Scientific and Creative Seminar School of the Sonnet, two of his poetological essays for publication in the next issue of the almanac «Wreath of Sonnetologists and Sonnetists». The received grant makes it possible to publish both the essays themselves and the comments adequate to them. Both of them are devoted to the pioneering experiments of Maximilian Voloshin, the author of two wreaths –«Corona Astralis», 1909, and «Lunaria», 1913, in which a new unheard-of genre-strophic form was first tested in relation to the philosophy of cosmism. This issue, in resonance with the predilection for stephanistics, most of all occupied Linnik himself. Linnik's metapoetic interpretation of two masterpieces of his predecessor will be of undoubted interest both for researchers of sonnet wreaths and for poets who cultivate them in their work. This time we bring to the attention of readers the second essay «Somnambulistic». The first one, we hope, will be published by our Kazakh colleagues.