“The guests were arriving at the dacha...”: on the dacha topos in the poetry of Alexander Kushner

Abstract

The topos of the dacha – like the topos of the city (St. Petersburg) and that of the garden – is an important element of the spatial dimension of Alexander Kushner’s poetic world. The article attempts to trace the productivity and functionality of the topos in selected texts of this contempo­rary poet. Attention is drawn to the characteristics of the categories of time and space, the constituents of the life on the dacha , as well as connections with the literary tradition. When taking up the subject, Kushner updates the rich semantics of the topos: the dacha as a place of retreat for a poet, a place of rest and work, the little homeland, a paradise on Earth.