Концепт «Жалость» в поэтическом языке Иосифа Бродского

Abstract

The paper is to analyze the reflection of the concept ‘pity’ in a poetic heritage of Joseph Brodsky. The study reveals that the poet, when depicting one of the most valuable for him moral concepts of “pity”, uses related verbal lexemes “to regret”, “to regret” as representative predicates, as well as the noun pity, derived from them, as the name of the concept in different years of his work. It is shown that the nominal lexeme “pity” is included in poetic lines colored with a positive connotation (in connection with phenomena that are not subject to man: death, star, glory) and a negative one (applicable to the idea of freedom or the natural time of the year). Some other moral values were found to be the content of the act of pity in poetic lines of J. Brodsky, in which the lyrical subject of pity must show care and treat himself with care, must protect and spare himself, and not anyone else (which is usually noted by researchers). The examples show how, in order to reach special expressiveness of poetic lines and to stress the meaning of 'pity', the poet uses repetitions of various kinds: verbal predicates, the object of pity, or circumstances of time and degree. The results obtained may be of interest to the literary scholars studying the work of Joseph Brodsky and find the use in compiling the poet's dictionary.