Is the Text still Alive, or Apology of an Autonomous Piece of Poetry (Based on Joseph Brodsky’s Poem «She Puts on the Stockings, and Fall Comes...»)

Abstract

The article notes a marked preference given by the philological investigations of the last decades for the discourse-centered approach to analyzing a literary text, a poetic text in particular. The major idea that makes the sense and pathos of this
 publication is that the text-centered approach, as distinct from the discourse-centered one and applied much less frequently, is feasible due to the fact that any «high-grade»
 literary text is of value by itself: its faultless perception and correct assessment by the recipient do not require involvement of cultural and historic context and appeal to
 the broad literary context. Moreover, the first and foremost condition of the existence of a unique cultural
 artifact, i.e. a quality literary text, is nothing but its formal and semantic self-dependence, therefore it is self-containment, that is autonomy. The prime example is Joseph Brodsky’s 16-line poetic miniature «She Puts on
 the Stockings and Fall Comes...» written in 1994. It undergoes a deep line-by-line semantic and stylistic analysis with a focus on the parameters demonstrating the choice of a dominant sensory canal (vision, audition, partly smell), an object of poetic
 description (a portrait, landscape, indoor scenes), a dynamic / static description. The article has noted the textual semantic «frame» reflecting expressly realistic impres-
 sions; at the same time, everything embraced by the «frame» reflects the inner world of the character, his flash-back, doubts, self-reflection, emotions. The conclusion of the paper is as follows: the author’s literary skill, his technique, mastery of the language means and control of speech including its «accelera-
 tion» and «moderation», individual poetic taste and intuition are all embodied in the literary result that needs no special search for any extra-textual links and their obligatory involvement in the perception and comprehension of the text. Brodsky’s
 poem is not an only literary example; it clearly demonstrates a case when the poet, without too much effort, manages «to button up the beauty», i.e. the aesthetic dominant of his personal world (outlook), art, senses, thoughts, soul, «in the dark tower
 of poem» (Pasternak), turn this dominant into something hermetic and intimate, and on the other hand open to an attentive reader.