Received August 19, 2020
In 2018, the full translation of Ezra Pound's poem "The Cantos" was published in the St. Petersburg the "Nauka" publisher. It was carried out by Andrei Bronnikov, who also prepared comments on the text and wrote an extensive and informative introductory article. This event could quite be considered one of the key events in the history of Russian artistic culture if it had happened twenty or thirty years earlier: at the time when the journal "Inostrannaia literatura" (Foreign Literature) published in Russian the novel "Ulysses" by James Joyce, and for a whole year (and that is all twelve issues) subscribers were waiting for the coveted continuation; when translations of all unfinished novels by Franz Kafka came out; and when they were seriously upset that Nikolai Liubimov did not manage to complete the translation of the lyric epic of Marcel Proust "In Search of Lost Time". It was several decades during which Russia discovered the twentieth century, its artistic identity when the world twentieth century became part of Russian history. And this century, as well as the nineteenth, was a real flourishing of art and literature, first of all, literature. By the middle of the twentieth century, the literature centrism of artistic culture had dried up and was replaced first by screen and entertainment art, and then by network performance. And today, it is the Internet that is becoming a space for the implementation of culture, in which there are no longer authors and their masterpieces, and even spectacular and expressive images designed for momentary mass delight. Russia was the last country in which this respect for authors and masterpieces remained at the end of the twentieth century, it lingered a little in the past, and this made it possible to appreciate the great art of the first half of the twentieth century. But that time has passed. Now the masterpieces affect only experts. Nowadays, it is much more important to perpetuate the personal content of each user in the Internet space, and to follow the vicissitudes of virtualization of tiny events in his life, believing that this is a good way to join the eternal and find the meaning of being.