TITLE AS A FIGURATIVE AND SYMBOLIC CENTER OF BORIS PASTERNAK’S POETRY COLLECTION “OVER THE BARRIERS”

Abstract

This article, based on my report at the international conference dedicated to the 130th anniversary of B. L. Pasternak (China, Hangzhou, Zhejiang University, 8-10 November 2020), is aimed at studying the nature of the relationship between the title of the collection and the texts of the poems included in it. The relevance of the work is determined by the anthropocentric orientation of modern linguistics, which focuses on the linguistic personality and the world picture of the creative individual. The theoretical section discusses the methodological foundations of the research, reveals conceptual categories, highlights a complex of factors that affect the perception and understanding of Pasternak’s lyrics. The practical part of this article contains the results of a contextual analysis of the lyric works titles. The symbolic meanings of the title-trope are presented, the associative features of which correlate with the idea of overcoming limitations in the broad sense of the word. In poetic texts, the referent of the key sign is manifested by lexemes: body (intimate space), courtyard (home space), sleep (border space), street and canals (segments of urban space), railway (technogenic space), weather conditions (obstacles in the perception of the environment), ice (natural shackles that are temporary) etc. The conclusions are formulated in the following judgments: 1) the title, which is considered to be global and local “ad hoc” connectivity, makes the entire collection complete, strengthens its internal unity due to the motive of overcoming space-time boundaries; 2) the formula “over the barriers” symbolizes the boundaries both in personal and biographical terms and in the philosophical and psychological sense, emphasizes the complexity and significance of the poet’s creative quests.