Poet Inside the "Small" and "Great" Time. The Work of Aleh Minkin

Abstract

In the context of the ideas of the Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin about the “small” and “great” time of a work of art, the article examines the work of the famous Belarusian poet Aleh Minkin (born in 1952). Analyzing the poems of Minkin from the poetry collections of Surma (1985) and Raskolìna (1991), the author of the article comes to the conclusion that Minkin’s poems, which arose in the context of a “small” time (the biography of the poet, the history of Belarus at the end of the 20th century), still remain relevant in the thematic and ideological aspect (national revival motifs, dreams of freedom and true independence of the native country), and thanks to the deep rootedness in the literary tradition, intertextual connections with the masterpieces of world literature (Dante's Divine Comedy, Edgar Allan Poe's Raven, Maxim Bahdanovich's Chase, etc. ), the perfection of the artistic form strengthen their presence in “great time”: they are being republished in collections of selected works of the poet, collective anthologies, influencing the work of other writers and, before our eyes, becoming classics of Belarusian literature.