“I dreamed that everyone is a poet there...” Images of Japan in Russian the Poetry of the Silver Age

Abstract

Eastern motifs permeate the entire body of Russian Literature. These motifs not only transform many works of Russian Literature into Oriental novelettes and stories, poems and ballads, but reach into the very heart of poetic vision, transmitting poetic forms, and intruding into the meditations of the poets. The works of Russian writers, which in sum create oriental images of the Ancient East, Palestine, Islamic world, India, China, Japan, are extremely numerous. Sometimes these works reveal certain similarities with the ideas and imagery of West European compositions, sometimes they are substantially different from them. The pieces published here are always peculiar, thus allowing the reader not only to see the East, especially Japan through the eyes of Russian writers, but also enabling him to better understand Russia itself through its vision of the East.