“IF YOU ASK ME WHAT HAPPINESS IS...” (IDEOLOGY AND POETICS OF AVAR LEGIONARIES POETRY)

Abstract

The article is the first attempt to give a scientific assessment of the poetry of the Avar legionaries, to identify the features of its ideology and poetics. As an artistic and aesthetic phenomenon, it appeared during the Great Patriotic War on the territory of Nazi Germany among the Avar soldiers of the North Caucasian legions formed during the war by the Hitlerites. The article focuses on the role of the newspaper Gazavat, published in Nazi Germany from 1943 to 1945 in Russian and the languages of some peoples of the North Caucasus, in the genesis of the studied poetry. The poetry of the Avar legionaries, which functioned for a short time away from their homeland, is a peculiar phenomenon in Avar literature in terms of its artistic and poetic characteristics, style, and language. At the same time, along with the features characteristic of classical poetry, the artistic and aesthetic phenomenon under study has its own characteristics, due to the circumstances and chronotope of its formation. Its distinctive side is a pronounced publicism. It is determined by the military reality, which required from the authors mainly agitation and conscription vocabulary, bright, emotionally rich words. Carrying a journalistic and purposeful charge, these words were intended to have a psychological and moral impact on the mind, worldview and ideology of the reader. The article emphasizes the originality of the subject of the studied poetry – it is very diverse and contradictory. The fate of Dagestan, the bitterness of parting with relatives, hatred of the Soviet Union and its army, the praise of Nazi Germany and its Fuhrer, the Declaration of loyalty to the military traditions of their ancestors, fanatical faith in their mission and at the same time singing of love as the highest spiritual state of the lyric hero – these and other motives are reflected in the work of legionary poets. Despite the small volume and lack of genre-thematic and stylistic diversity, the named poetry reveals the presence of different aesthetic paradigms, the formation of new ideas about the world picture. As a local artistic phenomenon, it opens up new aspects of the reality of war, which were not accepted to write about.