Reviving Andrei Bely’s heritage: Metricalization in Vladimir Gubin’s Illarion i Karlik

The heritage left by the literary experiments of the Silver Age and of the avant-garde was almost forgotten until the 1960s, when dissent towards the socialist realism’s guidelines became stronger and the cultural underground started to take shape. In this context, some authors re-discovered the achievements of the 1920s’ literature and mixed them with the feelings and perceptions of the Soviet man. One of them was V. Gubin, whose povest’ Illarion i Karlik is a clear sample of this attempt of recreating the connection, previously abruptly broken, between the underground culture of the 1960s and the Silver Age. The aim of this paper is to focus on Illarion i Karlik, underlining the connection between his artistic sensibility and the explorations of Andrei Bely, who started to pursuit the complete metricalization of the prosaic text. This rhetorical device indeed constitutes the basis of the novel and offers a sample of how aesthetics became the main way of resistance against the regime.