"The sadness of things” or melancholy smile. On reading aesthetic moods and qualities in the poetry of the Far East and its modern imitations

Abstract

The article aims to describe how reading aesthetic qualities and artist’s moods in the Far East poetry looks from the perspective of a Western scholar, how they are imitated in European works. The publication concerns the analysis of these aspects in haiku and waka. For works of such type the characteristic trait is the sense of melancholy, arising from awareness that the world and the subject that is learning it are both elusive. The impression of constantly changing environment and the transience of time characteristic of haiku and waka has its roots in the Buddhist belief in the impermanence of things that contributed to the formation of a specific type of perception: experiencing beauty with pain. It is from the Buddhism that the term mujōkan derives from, later used to describe the emotional perception of reality. The Japanese expanded this experience even more, adding to the awareness of impermanence the feeling of painful beauty. The author argues that the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun understand the concept of beauty completely differently from us, that they have different aesthetic categories, and yet European artists attempt to imitate them.