A Cumulative Principle in the Figurative Structure of the Lyric Poetry of Leonid Aronzon and Joseph Brodsky Cover Image

Принцип кумуляции в образной структуре лирики Леонида Аронзона и Иосифа Бродского
A Cumulative Principle in the Figurative Structure of the Lyric Poetry of Leonid Aronzon and Joseph Brodsky

Author(s): Aleksey S. Bokarev
Subject(s): Semantics, Comparative Study of Literature, Russian Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Петрозаводский государственный университет
Keywords: Aronzon; Brodsky; modern Russian poetry; cumulation; figurative syncretism; motif; image;

Summary/Abstract: The study defines the tendency of modern poetry to gravitate towards enumeration and registers as an attempt to “restore” the cumulative figurative language, which has not a conditionally poetic, but mythologically real status. From the standpoint of historical poetics, such a language is interpreted as a series of outwardly heterogeneous, but semantically identical phenomena, rooted in the archaic consciousness. The specifics of the worldview in the lyrics of L. Aronzon and J. Brodsky, namely, a complex of motifs represented with the help of cumulative structures, is the subject of study. The study asserts that, having a stable “semantic halo” (extensive assimilation of reality as a set of equivalent elements), accumulation performs a wide range of tasks, forming bundles with different, if not opposite, motifs (“unity and magnificence” of the world — Aronzon; discreteness of being and its overcoming — Brodsky). A detailed analysis of both authors’ poems allows to identify both invariant (historically determined) and variative (individual creative) features of the cumulative figurative language.

  • Issue Year: 18/2020
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 315-341
  • Page Count: 27
  • Language: Russian