How “Formal” are Transformations in Modern Russian Poetry?

Abstract

This article analyses the current state of Russian poetry. The author concludes that modern poetry is aimed at experiment, primarily with the form of the text, herein the changes are not only formal but also create a semantic increment. It is stated that experiments in poetry are associated with the poets’ commitment to metalinguistic reflection, which forces them to seek means of formal expressiveness at different levels of the language or take advantage of the interaction of levels. The verse organisation itself implying a vertical context, sound organisation and structural parallelism also predisposes to form searches. It is argued that in modern poetry tropes as semantic transformations cease to play a primary role, and the so-called “formotropes” take their place, i.e. the transposition of form and semantic transfer give rise to a united transforming poetic “shift”. Such a form transposition can be performed both at the level of direct presentation of the text in the written form or at the metagraphic level (grapho-derivatives, special text arrangement on the page, distribution of spaces, intra-word and inter-word punctuation, internal division of the word), and at the level of generating word forms that are neological in their way of derivation and semantic functions in the text. In the same text, the presence of both form transformations causing semantic transformations is possible. At the same time, there are poetic texts in which figurativeness is created using traditional tropes, primarily comparative (metaphors and similes). In all cases it can be stated that the closeness of the connection between the words within the verse rows is each time set by the author, and there are no parameters specified once and for all for either the semantic or syntactic “tightness of the verse rows”.