Peculiarities of Sergei Yesenin’s Worldview, Reflected in His Poetic Language

Abstract

The article examines the features of creating epithets based on mixing semantic fields in the Sergei Yesenin’s poetic language. The author makes an attempt to look at poetic creativity from the inside: to systematize the words chosen by the poet, analyze the patterns of their use, identify the basis of compatibility, and trace the ways of the origin of the author’s tropes. The research is in line with the description of the idiostyle of artists of the Russian word, and the study of the language of the poetic works of Yesenin seems relevant and promising. The work is aimed at studying the functioning and compatibility of lexemes in the language of a particular writer. The article outlines the prospects for lexicalsemantic research, which involves selection, classification, and analysis of the compatibility of lexemes in order to determine their place in the poet’s linguistic picture of the world. In the article, depending on the tasks being solved, the following methods are used: continuous sampling, description, comparison, contextual, semantic and stylistic analysis of the linguistic structure of a literary text using specific techniques of linguostylistic analysis. A feature of Yesenin’s lyrics is the unexpectedness of the images created in violation of the laws of lexical compatibility. The author have identified and described three groups of epithets that give rise to a unique idiostyle: synesthetic (all senses are actively involved in perception), oxymoronic (incompatible extremes of human feelings are combined) and paradoxical (similarity is only in the eyes of the poet). A poetic picture of the Yesenin’s world is almost always distinguished by a multifaceted characteristic, expressed in a combination of several levels of perception. The poet sees the surrounding reality differently than his contemporaries, and wants the reader to penetrate into his figurative representation, achieve a combination of various sensory sensations, combine extremely incompatible human feelings, and be able to find similarities in completely different objects. The results of the study are in line with the identification, description and analysis of lexical and thematic groups of Yesenin’s lyrics and lay down the prospects for compiling materials for a thematic dictionary.