“The Sign of Scales” by Maxym Rylsky: The Articulation of Trauma of Socialist Realism and an Attempt to Overcome it

This article aims to analyze the first Socialist Realism poetry collection of Maksym Rylsky “The Sign of Scales” which was written after poet’s six-months imprisonment in 1931. Also, this investigation outlines the strategies of articulation of Maksym Rylsky’s trauma of the forced transition to Socialist Realist, as well as the ways of expressing himself in the works of the Socialist Realism collection as a Neoclassical poet. “The Sign of Scales” demonstrates the poet’s ability to balance allowed and desired topics. This poetry collection has two readers. The first one is the Soviet authority. For this reader, Maksym Rylsky glorifies socialist labor, scientific progress, and Vladimir Lenin’s achievements. Confessing past errors, he considers his works of the 1920s an ideological mistake. Another recipient of “The Sign of Scales” is a well-educated neoclassical reader who can recognize the hidden references of the poems. In the poems of “The Sign of Scales”, Rylsky implements the images, citations, and allusions to the European literature, the works of the 1920s Neoclassicists, and the translations from French literature / and their translations from French. To go beyond Sovietism, the author appeals to ideologically neutral and philosophical poetry. The poet aims to keep the memory of the core images of Neoclassicism. For this purpose, he numerously names them even in a negative meaning. Though “The Sign of Scales” is a collection that witnessed a Socialist Realist break in Maksym Rylsky’s works, the author found the ways to express himself as a Neoclassical poet even in this poetry collection. It means that Maksym Rylsky never betrayed the idea of high art and remained the representative of Kyiv Neoclassicism even in the Soviet 1930–1950s.