Uno sguardo dall'alto sulla città. Lermontov e la verticalità

The choice of the point of observation, the latitude from which to observe and through which give imaginary shape to one’s own creations, is a way of expressing the relationship between the poetic I and the cosmos. By taking this approach, Ronchetti offers an original reading of Lermontov’s texts and especially of the poem Skazka dlja detej (1839-40). The aerial vision of the cities, reminiscent of his earlier narrative Panorama Moskvy (1834), reconciles the opposition between Moscow and Petersburg where the latter is not anymore the city of stone, the grey capital of the Baltic Sea, but a universe/home, a comfortable place where the lyric I can find itself at ease as much as in the warm and welcoming Moscow of the mind. The core of Skazka, one of Lermontov’s most expressive texts, although incomplete, is precisely the poetic image of an immaterial being, sheer spirit inhabiting the skies, a domestic demon, who observes the world while flying over the city of Petersburg. The aerial spirit flies over the capital asleep and, in its magnificent beauty, manages to catch the glitter of the white nights, the scintillating rumbling of the Neva with its ships gliding to the sea. Through his Mephistopheles’ eyes, the city comes to life. The perspective on Petersburg changes. The new city is powerful and dynamic, its whole is perceived not anymore in the interrelationship between objects, but it depends on the point of observation. In this new and appealing perception of the city rendered in Skazka, the four basic elements present in nature meet and caress one another: the ethereal hug of a day ending into the next, the river’s waves leading the boats to sea, the remains of the earth worth the love of the lightening stars, the spirit merging into the smiling gaze of the stars. The drama of the aerial and the earthy essences meeting in a lyric vortex is echoed in many poets of the time. It also vivifies the image of the universe/home, of Lermontov’s dilated metropolis. From his perspective from “above”, the poet, however, does not miniaturize the world nor does he oppose the earthy images. In this sense a man of his times, Lermontov searches the absolute in the impossible encounter between the earth and the skies, that can take shape only in the poetic imagination capable of perceiving in a “bird-eye view” the dynamic deepness of the new capital. It is the vertical perception alone that can reconcile the two tropes of the cosmological axis. Lermontov’s approach is a quest. It is a search for that “angle”, a point of observation, capable to reconcile the tortuous paths of the human genre. This effort to produce a harmonic vision by changing the angle of observation is representative of the poet’s attempt to find a dimension able to make different symbols, times and places coexist in a reality that goes beyond the objective record. In Lermontov’s poetry, it is possible to detect the author’s need to answer the aspiration to eternity which is at the same time an eternity of the world and of the things existing within it. The original vertical perspective on the city contributes to give new meaning to the home the poet longs for, to embrace a new order of the world he attempts to penetrate.