Poetic Cycle Research Articles

The elusive meanings of translation: J.de Nerval’s sonnet “El Desdichado” from the “Chimeras” cycle

The study of the inversion of meaning, which inevitably occurs during translation, has become one of the priorities of both domestic and world comparative studies in recent decades. This problem formed the basis of the theory of cultural transfer, which began to be developed in the mid-1980s among French historians-Germanists. The methodology of cultural transfer, which has taught us to see the phenomenon rather positive in those transformations of meaning that occur during direct translation from one language to another, has retouched the question of the “archaeological” side of this phenomenon, which has long received the designation “reverse translation” in science. The article is devoted to the analysis of the first sonnet in Nerval’s poetic cycle “Chimeras”. A detailed analysis of the intertextual allusions concealed by the extremely hermetic sonnet “El Desdichado” is accompanied by a parallel analysis of two translations of this sonnet into Russian, made respectively by N.Ya. Rykova and Y.M.Denisov. Despite the high quality of translation, the method of “slow reading” of the sonnet shows how in the translation, even if seemingly close to the original, the semantic trajectories of the original and translated texts diverge. Such a comparative analysis allows us to reactualise Alexander Mikhailov’s 1990s idea of reverse translation, which turns out to be absolutely necessary when reading and perceiving especially translated poetry.

К ВОПРОСУ О ЦЕЛОСТНОСТИ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО МИРА ПИСАТЕЛЯ (на материале текстов Г. Ф. Лавкрафта)

The foundations of the wholeness of H. P. Lovecraft’s artistic world are revealed in the article. On the basis of plot and motif connections between separate texts, the writer constructs a mythology that uses the specifics of archaic thinking. The core of the system is the poetic cycle “Fungi from Yuggoth”: the thematic organization and symbolism of the sonnets manifest many similarities with prose texts. The interaction of poetic and prose components is of a synthetic nature and has forms of metrized prose, prose poetry, intertextual parallelism. The components of the artistic world are combined into an anti-anthropocentric theory of the indifferent universe, developed in hybrid genre coordinates of the Gothic and science fiction.

ОТ РЕВОЛЮЦИИ К ГНОСТИЦИЗМУ: МИХАИЛ КУЗМИН ОСЕНЬЮ 1917 Г.

The article analyzes Mikhail Kuzmin’s poetic cycle Sofia. Gnostic Poems (1917–1918) in the context of his political position in the second half of 1917. Contrary to the assumptions that this cycle, inspired with Gnostic symbolism, became Kuzmin’s way of escapism and his departure from actual problems, a new interpretation of the cycle is proposed. Analysis of the poetics and pragmatics of the cycle against the background of his other works and diaries of 1917 suggests that the gnostic theme has become the way of his mystical understanding of the revolution. Taking into account the fact that the poems were written during a period when Kuzmin shared revolutionary enthusiasm and welcomed both the February and October revolutions. The central Gnostic myth, the descent of Sophia, Kuzmin juxtaposed onto current events, trying to see in the revolution a project for a radical reorganization of the world and the spiritual renewal of man

Пейзаж на театральном занавесе, чайном блюдце и экране веера: экфрасис в произведениях О. Бердсли, Р. Фирбенка, М. Кузмина

The article studies the influence of Aubrey Beardsley on the English prose writer Ronald Firbank and Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin, both of whom worked at the beginning of the 20th century. Theanalysis of literary works in the article is based on comparative-historical and aesthetic-poetological ap-proaches. The ekphrasis of the palace in Firbank’s novel The Artificial Princessis shown to have intermedial connections with A.Beardsley’s novel Under the Hill, or the Story of Venus and Tannhäuserand with M.Kuzmin’s poems Fuji in a Saucerand The Northern Fan. Comparative analysis leads to the conclusion that the relationships between nature and art in the works of Beardsley, Firbank, and Kuzmin are viewed through the prism of culture. In Beardsley’s novel, the landscape of a lake with frogs is created in the hero’s imagination and reflects his desires and fears, which emphasizes the romantic genesis of decadence. The de-scription ends with the assumption that the lake does not really exist, but is only painted on a theater curtain. Firbank presents the ekphrasis of the palace park from different points of view. Reality is transformed not so much by the subjectivity of vision as by its paradoxical perspective. The ‘deceptive expanse’ of the land-scape, narrowing, is compared with the image on a porcelain cup or saucer, or on the silken panel of a fan –‘so much... in so little’.In Kuzmin’s ekphrastic poem Fuji in a Saucer, the landscape simultaneously nar-rows and expands, demonstrating the unity of nature and art. Unlike the landscape descriptions by Beardsley and Firbank, Kuzmin’s poem immediately indicates the ekphrastic nature of the description, which deter-mines its genre integrity. In Firbank’s novel, the leaves of the fan in the hands of the princess cross the night sky with twin-kling planets leading into the world of dreams and imagination. A direct reference to Charles Conder indi-rectly points to the tradition of Beardsley, whose drawings the creator of the fan admired and imitated. Kuzmin’s poetic cycle The Northern Fanopens with a direct reference to Beardsley, whom Kuzmin com-pared with his friend Yu.Yurkun (the cycle is dedicated to him). Each poem is like a leaf of a fan, but while the first poem mentions only the material and details, the last one describes the movement of the fan leaves as four elements and four cardinal points, reminiscent of the film by J.Méliès The Wonderful Living Fan. The transformation of the fan in this film ends with the rotation of the planets in the starry sky, as on Fir-bank’s fan. Thus, ekphrasis in the works of Firbank and Kuzmin, aesthetically ascending to Beardsley, is distinguished by a change of points of view, by allusions to cinematographic images and the realities of the 20thcentury.

“And hop from Riga to Krakow…”: (Un)traditional Polish Text in the Cycle of Poems “The Krakow Trumpeter“ by Sergey Moreino

This article focuses on the issue of so-called Polish text of Russian culture in the poetic cycle Krakovskiĭ trubach [The Krakow Trumpeter] (1989–1990) by Sergey Moreino, a Russian poet and translator, who currently lives in Latvia. Traditional semiotic patterns and national stereotypes which existed in Soviet culture (Poland as a Big Cemetery, Poland as a Big Border, Romantic Poland, etc.) had a long-term impact on post-Soviet literature. As it turns out, however, in the case of Sergei Moreino, who consciously kept distance from any Polonophilia moods of the 1960s and 70s, there emerged innovative ways of presenting Poland, and especially the urban space of Krakow.

Performativity of remixed poetry. Computational translations and Digital Humanities

Abstract Digital Humanities favours creativity with the help of remixing, hybridization, contamination, and computational translation. An example in point is the book published in 2021 by MARGENTO, Steve Rushton and Taner Murat: Various wanted/Se caută diversuri. Starting from Ovid’s poetic cycle Amores, the authors prove their adroitness in playing with rhythms, prosody, and augmented or compensated translations. Their enterprise is founded on the archetype of dislocation, as the three poets who helped them establish a model for writing/assembling poems, Ovid, Christopher Marlowe, and John Dryden, were ostracized figures. That is why the translations embarked upon in the volume are dislocating and creative. These approaches are tackled with the help of Eugen Coșeriu’s integral linguistics and with Sorin Ciutacu’s enlightening observations on the study of change. The latest enhancements in Digital Humanities have consecrated a second orality and a third textuality, as José Manuel Lucía Megías remarked.

Vasyl Haiduchok – the Poet of a Single Cycle

The article analyzes the only known poetic cycle by Vasyl Haiduchok, published in the Skrynia maga-zine. The text is focused on the problem of silence, which is fundamental for Ukrainian underground poetry, in spite of being understood in different axiological and semantic planes. The article discovers how the concept of silence interacts with the Christian symbols, concepts of time and death, and traditional Ukrainian images. Being connected with the internal emigration as a constructive strategy of the author who resists the invasion of the aggressive Soviet language, the concept of unvoiced is also substantial for surrealistic and hermeticism poetics. Moreover, Vasyl Haiduchok and other Ukrainian poets of the late 60s and 70s were forced to silence in an act of cultural and ideological abuse of the totalitarian system. After the arrests of the Lviv intellectuals and the confiscation of the entire print run of the Skrynia in 1972, Vasyl Haiduchok never went back to creative writing and died in poverty. The aim of the article is to return his voice to the Ukrainian literature discourse. To discover the philosophical particularities of the cycle we compare it with the texts of other poets of the Skrynia magazine. We draw a parallel between the artistic destiny of Haiduchok and Chubai. Censorship and political persecution pushed both of the writers not only into the underground but also into complete silence. While the poetry by Chubai is scientifically analyzed in modern journals, the cycle by Haiduchok is almost unknown even among philologists.

A Book of Poems in Internet Space: an Intermedial Aspect

The work was carried out in line with the current idea of the Internet as a global media that interacts with various sign systems and influences the structural and compositional features of the verbal text. The relevance of the study is due to the formation of the concept of intermediality in the context of a new cultural direction, called “metavirtualism”. The aim of the article is to characterize the principles underlying the structure and composition of the network poetic “book”. Russian-language poetic cycles are considered, the structural and compositional features and expressive means of which are associated with Internet technologies. Such aspects as the type of intermediality and ways of organizing the structure and composition of the network “book” are analyzed; the reader’s way of getting acquainted with the work and the degree of freedom of this way; manifestation of the category of ephemerality. It is concluded that technological poetry, paradoxically, strengthens traditional book forms, but also has an independent value, visualizing poetic images and metaphors. Internet technologies can be “embedded” into the structure and composition of a poetry book at various levels: it can be relative autonomy; interaction at the level of a conceptual metaphor explicated with the help of Internet media (Google maps); almost complete fusion of media.

The Cultural Heritage of Judaism in the Poetry of Anna Frajlich

Abstract Evidence of the presence of references to Jewish culture in Anna Frajlich's work can be found in many of her poems. However, the connection with Judaism is most strongly verbalized in her poetic cycle “Wiersze izraelskie” [Israel poems], included in Ogrodem i ogrodzeniem [Garden and fence, 1993], Frajlich's first volume of poems to be published in Poland. The cycle was created during the author's visit to Eretz Israel in 1991. The cycle is comprised of seven parts, each with its own title, which differ in terms of subject matter, style, and genre. Poems range from a poetic picture to a lyrical joke. The poetic cycle opens with the poem “Na pustyni” [In the desert], followed by three lyrical poems that focus on the capital of the state of Israel—“Jerozolima” [Jerusalem], “Sala dziecięca w muzeum męczeństwa Yad Vashem w Jerozolimie” [The children's hall in the museum of martyrdom Yad Vashem in Jerusalem], and “Jeszcze o Jerozolimie” [Another on Jerusalem], and closes with another sequence of three parts: “Do przyjaciela w Haifie” [To a friend in Haifa'], “Z piosenką tą” [With that/this song'], and “Cezarea” [Caesarea]. The order of the poems signals the fundamental role played by the topographic and geographic dimensions of this poetry, which as a result becomes a diary of the lyric persona's travels from the south to the north (in the context of both place and time).

CYCLIZATION IN OLEKSA STEFANOVYCH’S POETRY

The article analyses the peculiarities of cyclization in Oleksa Stefanovych’s (1899—1970) poetry. Based on the theoretical definitions of a lyrical cycle (cycle of poems, sequence of poems) formulated in the works of Rolf Fieguth, Mikhail Darvin, Larisa Liapina, Ronald Vroon, Leonid Yanitskii, et al., the research outlines the main compositional, stylistic, thematic, and functional traits of Stefanovych’s lyrical cycles and demonstrates the evolution of certain key images in them. The material for analysis is taken from the collection of Stefanovych’s poetry published posthumously in Toronto (“Zibrani Tvory” / “Collected Works”, 1975).
 The special attention is paid to his apocalyptic cycle “Kintsesvitnie” (“The World’s End”) that demonstrates the whole complex of architectonic and stylistic features inherent to a cycle of poems, particularly the presence of the ‘cyclic subject’ defined by R. Fieguth as “the subject of all creative, especially compositional, acts which are the basis of this poetic cycle” [13, 19].
 The composition of “Kintsesvitnie” is based on the combination of the chronological and the plot development principles allowing to encompass Stefanovych’s creative work as a whole. The poems from various periods are selected and arranged so that they form a clear cyclic structure with steady imagery and a distinct thematic echo between its beginning and its end. Their dating reflects the consistency of the poet’s catastrophic worldview declared by the cycle’s title. It also demonstrates the evolution of its key metaphors (an evil bird, a thunderstorm, a trumpet) that arise in Stefanovych’s early works as visual or acoustic images and gradually evolve into the apocalyptic symbols of “Kintsesvitnie”.

Сюжет «sibirica» в литературной и художественной трансформации (к истории одной полемики)

The research employs the comparative-historical method to expand insight into the so-called “Siberian text” and introduce new materials into academic circulation. The author uses works by the leaders of Siberian Oblastnichestvo (regionalism) of the mid-19th century and by the creators of the Far Eastern literary and artistic futuristic collections of the early Soviet rule to identify different approaches and views on the “Sibirica” plot in the emerging Siberian literature and art. This material under discussion has hardly ever been addressed or systemically analysed, which makes it comprehension relevant. The “Idea of Siberia” has become the main paradigm of the creative heritage of senior Oblastniki (regionalists). The founders of the Siberian doctrine put into it their view of Siberia as integrity. Siberian culture was to shape in this logic, too, developing its own type of an artist with a clear awareness of the “idea of place.” The main theses were outlined by the leaders of Siberian Oblastnichestvo Grigory N. Potanin and Nikolay M. Yadrintsev. Their ideas are later given a new meaning in the controversy among the Far Eastern futurists in the early Soviet years. In particular, in the collection “The Siberian Motif in Poetry (From Baldauf to the present day)”, the famous Marxist critic Nikolay F. Chuzhak suggests reconsidering the concept of “couleur locale.” Using the example of Innokentiy V. Fedorov-Omulevsky, whose creative biography was connected both with Siberia and the metropolis, Chuzhak makes references not only to regional literature, but also considers Siberian plots in the works of such artists as Vasily Surikov, Vladimir Vuchichevich, and Grigory Gurkin. In 1923, the Irkutsk art critic Dmitriy A. Boldyrev-Kazarin publishes an article “Sibirica in Art”, which, in fact, argues with Chuzhak's collection. Boldyrev-Kazarin puts forward the idea that it was precisely Chuzhak's ultra-Marxist approach that prevented him from fully understanding the “Sibirica” plot. He highlights the review of the futurist poet Nikolay Aseev “Siberian Tale” on Sergey Tretyakov's poetic cycle “Travel Pass”, created by the poet during his trip from Chita to Moscow. For Boldyrev-Kazarin, Aseev is primarily a poet, therefore “his approach to an exciting topic is based on artistic intuition rather than on exact, scientific analysis.” Tretyakov's poetic cycle, in turn, is a variant of the travelogue, which was mostly developed among futurists; therefore, the text space in his traveling poetic cycle becomes much more significant than another transcription of Siberia. Thus, in the process of formation and development of the “Sibirica” plot, it becomes more obvious, in terms of the frontier category, that European Russia in relation to Siberia is increasingly acquiring the features of a mobile zone of consolidation and development, a zone that is no longer divides as much as it brings together the internal and external spaces of culture.

Emotive potential of the lyrical heroine's voice in M. Tsvetaeva's poetic cycle "Wires"

Emotive potential of the lyrical heroine's voice in M. Tsvetaeva's poetic cycle "Wires"

«Песни западных славян» А. С. Пушкина в научном дискурсе Д. Н. Медриша

The article discusses innovative approaches to the interpretation of Pushkin’s poetic cycle “Songs of the Western Slavs” by D. N. Medrish, analyzes his discoveries in the creative history of the cycle – the Serbian folklore source found by the scientist for the plot of “Song of George Cherny”, reflections on the relationship in its poetics of folklore and literary traits.

АЛЬБОМ "АЛМАЗНЫЕ ПСЫ" Д. БОУИ КАК НАУЧНО-ФАНТАСТИЧЕСКОЕ ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЕ

The album “Diamond Dogs” by British musician David Bowie is analyzed in the article as an experimental poetic cycle. Originally conceived as a musical adaptation of G. Orwell’s “1984”, the album is a science fiction work involving multiple literary allusions. “Diamond Dogs” as a musical album is analyzed from the point of view of a direct analogy with the lyrical cycle, which has internal unity, but combines heterogeneous elements. Fragmentation and understatement are used as a way to expand the artistic universe of the album. In addition to Orwell’s novel, an important role in the narrative of the album “Diamond Dogs” is played by references to A. Burgess’s dystopian “A Clockwork Orange”, which had a great influence on Bowie’s image system of that time, as well as the novel “Wild Boys” by W.S. Burroughs, the plot and the imagery of which are woven into the artistic fabric of the album. The plots and zongs from B. Brecht and K. Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” also give the album a special aesthetics, particularly if one bears in mind the broader context of the musical theater media in which Bowie sought to place his work.

Narrating the Saints: Paulinus of Nola and the Beginning of Verse Hagiography

Paulinus of Nola's Natalicia represent a poetic cycle unparalleled in Latin literature: thirteen complete poems (and a fourteenth fragmentary one) composed every year for the annual festival of Saint Felix of Nola. This article considers the poems as a group, analyzing the sources of Paulinus's poetic invention and identifying significant features that run through the corpus. In particular, the concept of varietas serves as an aesthetic principle at various levels of integration and in various situations, while Paulinus's role as impresario of the cult of Saint Felix and master of ceremonies at the saint's festival finds expression in the metatextual directions he introduces into the text, the guided tour he gives to the shrine through the person of Nicetas of Remesiana in poem 27, and the mental peregrination he invites his reader/listener to take. Ultimately in Late Antiquity verse hagiography was to take a different course, but Paulinus's achievement remains substantial, and his poems illuminate an important stage in the history of the cult of the saints.

Рукописная книга Ив. Новикова «Платок забвенья» и традиции древнерусской книжности

In the first third of the twentieth century a certain tradition of creating a handwritten book developed in Russian culture. To a large extent, it relied on the traditions of Old Russian literature, where the book was a multi-level semiotic object with a sacred meaning. Starting from the binding and the quality of the paper and ending with the content, the Old Russian book was called upon to glorify God and show the man as the image and likeness of God. A medieval book as a set of letter designations is read in at least four dimensions: color, graphic, sound and numerical. And only the totality of all these levels gives the fullness of meaning, reflecting the harmony of the world and the fullness of being. A unique document of the era was deposited in the IWL — a handwritten book by the writer Iv. Novikov, created in the early 1920s and includes the poetic cycle “The Veil of Oblivion”. Designed for the author in the traditions of pre-reform spelling, decorated with illustrations, this is a monument that has a special theological program, and the key to understanding it the author finds in the Russian Middle Ages. The study shows how the traditions of the art of the book of Ancient Rus` come to life and are filled with new meanings in the Soviet culture of the 1920s.

The Story of one Poetic Cycle by Lesya Ukrainka

The Story of one Poetic Cycle by Lesya Ukrainka

«Часть речи» / “A Part of Speech” И. Бродского: двуязычие как творческий метод в поэзии

This article is an attempt of textological conceptualization of an interlingual transfer (doubling) of a literary text. This transfer, in case it has been done by the author him/herself, is traditionally called self-translation, yet it can also by qualified as an adaptation of the “old” text to the perceptive abilities of the “new” recipient, i.e. a collective reader representing a different national and cultural medium and bearing its values as a prevalent aesthetic waymark. Special importance in the above process is attached to such a significant feature of any literary text of high quality as its elasticity. The textological approach to the scientific understanding of the differentlanguage text binary is often complemented by the bilinguological categorization of the subject, i.e. a text of poetry and, at the same time, a poetic cycle. From this standpoint, the mode of primary/secondary character of the two interconnected texts might lose its substantial preciseness. Further on, the article scrutinizes a landmark (for the Russian culture) literary text and its self-translation: the poetic cycle “A Part of Speech” by Joseph Brodsky. Four conceptual dominants of the cycle, with regard to their axiological hierarchy, are distinguished: 1) space/distance – location – oblivion; 2) time (epoch) – history – event – oblivion; 3) love – breakup – oblivion; 4) speech – art – extension – immortality. Further, a comparative analysis of their different-language verbalization is carried out. It is stated that Brodsky’s creation of this bilingual cycle reflects his striving for a cultural adaptation of each version to the background knowledge, historical experience, principles, traditions, aesthetic attitudes and, generally, sentiments of different groups of readers. In some cases this is done by means of the national language only, in other cases by the general complication of the poems’ figurative fabric.

Arseny Tarkosvky’s <i>small cycles</i>: The artistic history and principles of text preparation

The article analyses the publication problem of A. Tarkovsky’s so-called ‘small cycles’ — poems sharing a common storyline and theme, which were not, however, published as poetic cycles in Tarkovsky’s lifetime, even though he had planned them as such and leſt respective handwritten collections. According to the critic, Tarkovsky created these poetic compilations irrespective of the actual possibility (or impossibility) of their publication. His entire experience of ‘living in literature,’ long years of failed attempts to publish abook of original poetry, the type of forbidding censorship policy prevailing at the time — everything indicated that one should better give up attempts toget published in the heavily supervised literary sector. Bak concludes that a publisher of Tarkovsky’s works should focus on reconstruction of the corpus that was not meant for censors, as the two compilations of his lyric oeuvre— the one prepared for publication and the other preserved in manuscripts only— exist in a sort of ‘alternative complementation,’ as if in parallel to each other, and should both be considered for preparation of scholarly publications.

Verbal-textual polyphonic technique in the Ukrainian choral music (on the example of music on Taras Shevchenko’s poetry)

Relevance of the study. In the 20th–21st centuries, searches in the field of sonoristics led to an unconventional interpretation of the sound of musical instruments and the human voice. As a result, contemporary composers are actively experimenting with vocal performance techniques. The timbresonorous quality of speech contributes to the emergence of new polyphonic techniques. The use of verbal-textual polyphonic techniques in the music of modern Ukrainian composers is becoming more and more widespread. This explains the relevance of this study. The scientific basis of the article is the insufficiently studied concept of verbal-textual polyphony by I. B. Pyaskovsky.
 Main objective of the study. The objective of this study is to examine the existing manifestations of verbal-textual polyphonic technique in Ukrainian choral music a cappella on the example of works based on the texts of the poetic cycle “Psalms of David” by T. Shevchenko. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the work is the first to consider verbal-textual polyphonic techniques in the works of Ukrainian composers on the texts of “Psalms of David” by T. Shevchenko.
 Methodology. The following methods of research are used: versioning (analysis of the versification features of the original poetic source), semantic (interpretation of the semantic content of the musical expressiveness means, their correlation with the text), typological (based on classification of the varieties of the studied technique).
 Results and conclusions. The main feature of verbal textual polyphony is the phonic interpretation of speech. This type of polyphonic technique is manifested in the work with text phonemes and syntagmas, which, as a rule, have intonation-rhythmic design. The prerequisites for this type of polyphony in musical works based on the texts of T. Shevchenko are the musicality of his poetry, as well as a specific rhythmic organization — the so-called 14-syllabic kolomijka verse. All examples of this writing technique can be divided into two groups, depending on the compositional work at the phonemic or syntagmatic levels. Phonemic compositional work is carried out by segmentation, vocal accentuation and temporal extension of the sound of the syllable. Work at the syntagmatic level is embodied using the following techniques: simultaneous multi-rhythmic presentation of the same text, text imitation, ostinato, polyphonic techniques of vocal intonation on a verbal and extra-musical basis. The analysis carried out indicates that the polyphonic technique in the studied works of Ukrainian composers is formed taking into account the versification features of the Shevchenko's poetry. The results of these observations can be used in the study of the manifestations of verbal textual polyphony in vocal-choral works on a different text basis