Blake’s Russian literary heir: Based on unpublished poems by Boris Anrep

The article deals with unpublished poems by Russian poet and artist Boris Anrep, which are studied in the context of developing the traditions of English romantic epical poems. The research of these poems as evidence of creative dialogue between Anrep and the prophetic poetry of William Blake is proposed. The research considers the epics “Vladimir”, “Creation of the world” and “Creation of man” written by Anrep in the 1900s, before he emigrated from Russia, and are kept in the archive of N. Nedobrovo (Personal collection of the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences). The methods of comparative literature studies and those of analysis, synthesis and generalization are used. The idea is substantiated that Anrep, already in his early poetic work, inherits in many respects the poetics and themes of William Blake's prophetic books, which he knew in childhood. The author identifies the commonality in the figurative system of poems Anrep and Blake: the characters are elements, giants, generalized natural phenomena. The gravitation of Anrep to a combination of physiology and philosophy, synthesis of author's inference and mimetic descriptions also testifies to influence of romantic lyre-epics. It is concluded that the early poems of Boris Anrep, as well as his later works (“The Man”, “Fiza”, “Foreword To The Book Of Anrep”), are in many ways an attempt to embody in Russian the principles of English romantic poetry, primarily the prophecies of William Blake. The reception of these poems in the work of the artist Dmitry Stelletsky has been studied. It has been proved that such an example of the reception of English romanticism in general is typical for the culture of the Silver Age, which rediscovered European early romanticism (Poe, Novalis, Hölderlin) and felt it as modern art.