The paper is devoted to the change in the plot organizing principles in during the evolution of
the ode of Horace “Ad Melpomene.” According to “Aesthetics” of Hegel, every ode involves the
struggle of the power of the content and the subjective freedom of the poet. Overcoming this split provides the creation of a “complete and united whole.” Thus, the duality of the ode is the contradiction
between the architectonics stability and rhetoric mobility. Such a split can be observed in
such a variety of genre as the ode of Horace “Ad Melpomene.”
It is supposed that the evolution of ode of Horace in Russian poetry had two trends. The first
trend was connected with Derzhavin’s ode and included the substitution of ancient mythology by
modern geographical and autobiographical symbols. The second trend was connected with Pushkin’s
poem “I have built myself a monument” which was organized as a special hierarchy of
senses by the change of the verse metre in last lines of each stanza. At the same time, Pushkin
used the method of transreminiscention (term by A. I. Zhuravleva and V. N. Nekrasov), which
transformed the rhetoric of the poem into the lyric confession. Pushkin substituted a synecdoche
by a metonymy and created a new code of the plot, with the motive of immortality being actualized
through personal freedom.
The creation of a new plot code by Pushkin led to the evolution of this genre in the XX century.
The main contribution to this evolution is considered to be made by Vladimir Mayakovsky
“At the top of my voice. First prelude to the poem” and Vladimir Vysotsky “A monument.”
While maintaining the confession as the global sign of genre, both poets solved the problem of
immortality differently. In “At the top of my voice,” one may observe that “the turn from futurism
to primitivism was viewed as a natural development of avant-garde principles as an evolution
from constructing the expression of forms to the strategy of life-building’ (I. Plehanova). In that
period, the immortality was understood by Mayakovsky as a sacrifice of personal “I” for collective
“We.” Vysotsky understood the immortality as the destruction of a monument and ecstatic
emergence of a revived poet. It is worth noting that both poets used the principle of the hierarchy
of meanings invented by Pushkin.
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