THE LAST ALBUM OF LEONARD COHEN AS A TEXT TESTAMENT

Abstract

Leonard Norman Cohen (1934-2016) is peculiar among singer-songwriters. His last album “You Want it Darker” may be characterized by a definite line of moves of the recipient and it’s results. That's why the investigator has three text units corresponding to three phases of reception: 1) name of the author / title of the album / names of the tracks making the whole text massive terminated as “preliminary text “ (“pretext”); 2) combination of songs as an indiscrete text massive marked as a “global text” (“macrotext”); 3) text of one song with deep “in-reading” for the actualization of implicit author’s senses, messages. Such texts may be more than one. But the recipient always concentrates upon one of them, and this central unit is named conditionally a “text of a song”. The reception of the album is completed at this phase, and independent reception of the recipient begins or continues simultaneously. Accordingly, works by L. Cohen may be learned as a global context including all albums, poetic collections and prose. Albums are the basic object because Cohen is famous as a singer first place. Yet each album is connected with another one, because it is characterizes by a theme relationship, succession of ideas, sense connections. Each album is a complicated structure, communicative sign of integral essence, and it is actualized on different levels of reception. The last album of Cohen is addressed not to a limited category of recipients, but to the whole mankind as a wishing for everybody to choose their own decision.