Семантический синкретизм в образной структуре лирики Александра Белякова

Abstract

Figurative syncretism that goes back to the linguistic archaism is construed as a complex notion of several semantic symptoms in a single word when the speech context does not eliminate the vagueness but rather generates it instead. Principles of signifying syncretic figurativeness in lyric poetry of the modern poet Alexander Belyakov are the subject matter of the research. The paper considers a package of themes and motifs represented by such figurativeness. Analysis shows that the sense content of syncretism in the author’s works is exclusively situational, i.e., it depends on the context; thus the link between a linguistic phenomenon or a technique (polysemy, homonymy, paronymic attraction, transformation of parts of speech) and the semantics is unstable and is formed anew at each stage of the poet’s creative endeavors. In the earlier verses, it is associated with ideas of instability and unnaturalness of the world order. In later and mature texts, its significance is determined by the book’s main theme, be it the universal disappearance and dispersion of everything (as in “The Traceless Marches”), protracted nightmare of a dreamer (as in “The Carbon-dioxide Dreams”), or creative efforts of a poet likened to a secret agent`s mission (as in “Rotation of Secret Expeditions,” and “Sumerian Spy”). That being said, A. Belyakov’s poetry can hardly be perceived as a full-scale “reincarnation” of linguistic archaism, since actually we are confronted merely with its imitation by means supplied by an essentially new, latest epoch. However, if the ancient syncretism was a premise of the knowledge and differentiation of phenomena, its modern counterpart — neo-syncretism — casts doubt on their knowledge and testifies to the total revision of the world undertaken by poetic consciousness.