"Without bargaining with your conscience": observations about the linguopoetics of N. A. Nekrasov’s lyrical poetry (to the 200th anniversary of the birth)

Abstract

The article aims to reveal N. A. Nekrasov’s linguopoetic innovations which underpinned the evolution of the subsequent Russian poetry. Various lexical layers of Nekrasov’s lyrical poetry and their formation against a background of the literary Russian language dynamics in the 1850–70s are analysed. The research outlines the major poetic themes of Nekrasov’s poetry, its linguistic content, and compositional development. The paper also devotes attention to the poet’s metrics and versification (in accordance with M. L. Gasparov’s theory concerning the relationship between metre and meaning). Additionally, specific syntactic features of Nekrasov’s poems, their emotional content, and pathos are revealed. N. A. Nekrasov’s thematic, linguistic, and compositional discoveries are compared with various poetic movements in the Russian poetry at the end of the XIXth and in XXth centuries. Besides the observation of the text, lexical semantic and stylistic analysis, the research also exploits the statistical and linguochronological potential of the Russian National Corpus.