"Maiden Offence is Victory’s Sister": the mythosemantics of personified names in P. G. Antokolsky’s poetry (to the 125th anniversary of the birth)

Abstract

The paper explores personification of common nouns and their imaginative-philosophical semantisation in the transition to the class of proper nouns. This stylistic device is systemic for the creative work of P. G. Antokolsky, one of outstanding Russian literary artists. The aim of the study is to identify the nature and contensive-semantic parameters of the personification of names because the poet’s process and result of world perception are concentrated in these parameters. The structural-semantic, holistic-systemic, historical-functional methods in conjunction with elements of the motif and hermeneutic analyses of literary texts in a variety of contexts (mythopoetic, historical-cultural, ethico-aesthetic) were employed to achieve this goal. The phenomenon of ontologisation of the concepts micro- and macrocosm is a characteristic feature of P. G. Antokolsky’s poetry. These concepts become independent poetic images possessing anthropomorphic qualities. Such images (e. g. Life, Time, History, Tragedy) emerged as a result of the author’s artistic generalisations. They accumulated concepts which are not infrequently verbalised with abstract vocabulary. The images acquired human qualities, became a crucial part of the narrative structure and were incorporated in broader paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations in the poet’s literary work. The most striking example of name personification is found in P. G. Antokolsky’s poem "Maiden Offence". In this piece, the mythosemantics of the main image (i. e. the author’s lyrical addressee) is determined in close connection with the artist’s historiosophic stance.