"DECREPIT CENTURY-OLD PARKS": THE IMAGE OF THE PARK IN THE RUSSIAN POETRY OF THE 19TH CENTURY AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The article considers two images typical of the Russian manor poetry of the 19th early 20th centuries - the "alley" and the "thickets," their originality, features, correlation and functions. The alley is one of the favorite images of Russian poetry. There are several reasons for this: the word "alley" is euphonious, showing the harmony of form and content; the alley is a manor reality, yet at the same time it is metaphysical: in the process of everyday life and historical conflicts the image of the alley undergoes changes, deepens (carries a whole complex of meanings: a place of meetings, reflections, memories, a symbol of the road of life, a reproduction of the world, etc.), begins to relate to the manor world as a whole, with its ambivalent characteristics. The alley in the park - whether it is French or English - appears as an instrument of creating harmony of the natural and the man-made, the victory of the human over chaos. The article shows that by the beginning of 20th century, the image of the overgrowth is more and more often used in poetry, and this image is different from the elegiac images of naturally neglected parks often used in poetry of the 19th century. This fact apparently reflects actual observations of poets (newspapers published notices of auctions; the desolation of estates is described in the magazines of the early 20th century, for example, in Capital and Estate, etc.), and the feeling of the coming Apocalypsis. By personifying the estate and its life, the alley in poetry also personifies the death of the estate through physical, "human" destruction or "inhuman," natural overgrowth.