Danceword: to the history of the Yesenin-Duncan creative relationship

The relationship between the dancer and the poet are not seen from the traditional love-story point of view, but as a model allowing to analyse a problem that has long been expecting its solution: the problem of associa¬tion between dance and word. This psychological problem particularly relevant to studying the genesis of con-sciousness is treated by the present paper using art as a material, namely, the free dance of Duncan and Yesenin's poetic language. A few years before meeting Isadora the poet wrote his theoretical work «Maria's keys», in which he formulated a number of ideas concerning the plastique of the word, seeing word as an orna¬ment or a gesture. In this and his other works on poetics dating back to 1918—1920 he described the verbal «ornament», «modelling of a word and an image», their «streaming» and «fluidity», and the «organic» images. Alternating and replacing each other, «line» and «ornament», «song» and «melody», «dance» and «gesture» constitute a specific discourse within his work. In this discourse, not only the plastique of a resonating word, but also the expression of dancing movement mastered by Duncan, becomes tangible. The creative union of a poet and a dancer helps us to see things unnoticed by purely literary, prosodic analysis - the plastique of the verse, its spatial organization, and its inherent motion vectors. A collation of dance with poetic word, in turn, reveals the expressiveness and the figurative plenitude of dance.