Russian Poetry Research Articles

Folklore paradigm of Tatar and Russian poetry of the 1960<sup>s</sup> –1980<sup>s</sup>

The article examines the folklore paradigm of Tatar and Russian poetry of the 1960s and 1980s based on poetic works and reveals the function peculiarities of oral folk art traditions, which influenced the formation of the artistic individuality of verbal art. Folklore traditions contribute to the development of a different poetic concept of the world, a new concept of the lyrical hero, the content and form of works. The significance of the article is determined by the fact that the peculiarities of the influence that folklore traditions had on Tatar and Russian poetry of the 1960s and 1980s have not been extensively addressed before. Tracing the folklore paradigm of Tatar and Russian poetry makes it possible to identify specific features of the development of different national literatures, to determine their general and special patterns of application and functions of oral folk art traditions. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the following: firstly, our attention is focused on the functional and artistic role of folklore motifs and images as a special form of artistic generalization; secondly, we reveal the common and special aspects of their application by poets of different literary traditions. The research results state that the folklore paradigm of Tatar and Russian poetry is different, the motifs and images of oral folk art serve to actualize the author’s position in accordance with philosophical and aesthetic concepts and specific creative attitudes. Folklore images and motifs are perceived by poets as an opportunity to change artistic paradigms in the 1960s and indicate the return of literature to national classical traditions.

Using the folklore and poetry by Sergei Yesenin in Russian as a foreign language lessons: an online class

Object of the article: Russian as a foreign language classes. Subject of the article: the method of creating an artificial language environment in classes with students from Asia and Africa who study Russian as a foreign language. Material of the article: an online experiment on the use of materials of Russian folklore and the artistic heritage of the poet of the early XX century Sergei Esenin in classes with foreign students. The purpose of the article is to identify the national axiology in Russian poetry. The purpose of the article is to show the features of the online lesson of Russian as a foreign language. Methodology: holistic hermeneutic analysis of the song on the poet's verses "Above the window the moon" with the involvement of biographical commentary and historical-literary context. The results of the study consist in the development of a methodology for analyzing the text with foreign students, aimed at a holistic perception and understanding of the poetic text.

Interview: Faust in Three Languages, or How to Translate Goethe without Knowing German

Abstract Vadim Astrakhan is a Russian immigrant to the United States who has made a name for himself as a translator and performer of songs by Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky. While his previous translations were all from Russian, Astrakhan’s latest project is an English verse rendition of Goethe’s Faust. Astrakhan does not know German. He begins by running Goethe’s original text through Google Translate. He then collates the result with various existing English-language versions of Faust as well as the canonical Russian verse translation by Boris Pasternak (published 1953), which was his main inspiration for putting Faust into rhymed English verse. Adrian Wanner, a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Penn State and a native speaker of German, discusses with Astrakhan what prompted him to translate Goethe’s tragedy. The conversation touches on Astrakhan’s use of English and Russian sources and his methodology and goals as a translator, including the crucial importance he ascribes to bringing to life the music and humor of Goethe’s original for a contemporary American theatrical audience.

Interview: Faust in Three Languages, or How to Translate Goethe without Knowing German

Abstract Vadim Astrakhan is a Russian immigrant to the United States who has made a name for himself as a translator and performer of songs by Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky. While his previous translations were all from Russian, Astrakhan’s latest project is an English verse rendition of Goethe’s Faust. Astrakhan does not know German. He begins by running Goethe’s original text through Google Translate. He then collates the result with various existing English-language versions of Faust as well as the canonical Russian verse translation by Boris Pasternak (published 1953), which was his main inspiration for putting Faust into rhymed English verse. Adrian Wanner, a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Penn State and a native speaker of German, discusses with Astrakhan what prompted him to translate Goethe’s tragedy. The conversation touches on Astrakhan’s use of English and Russian sources and his methodology and goals as a translator, including the crucial importance he ascribes to bringing to life the music and humor of Goethe’s original for a contemporary American theatrical audience.

Eschatological Motifs in the Russian Poetry of the Silver Age

In the article the author examines the main eschatological motifs in the Russian poetry of the Silver Age. Russian culture creators of the Silver Age showed that one of the most important features of their worldview was its eschatology and a sense of catastrophism of Russian and world history. The aujor considers key works of Russian poetic tradition containing deep eschatological motives – the comprehension of history as a catastrophe. This aspect of the poetry of the Silver Age makes it possible to see more clearly this special facet of the world signifi cance of Russian poetry.

Notes on Russian Poetry Translated into Italian between 1987 and 2022

The paper discusses the Italian reception of Russian language poetry taking into account translations carried out between 1987 and 2022. The survey deals mainly with anthologies, journal issues devoted entirely or partially (but significantly) to Russian poetry, and single volumes of Russian poets translated into Italian entirely devoted to poets writing in Russian. With more than four hundred publications, it is clear Russian poetry has found a place in the Italian language. This is shown by the amount of poets who have appeared in Italian (and have been included in the table attached to the paper), and by the extensive bibliography placed in the repository of the journal “Studi Slavistici”.

Этнокультурная специфика образа коня в кабардинской и русской поэзии

Among the key zoomorphic images in classical literature, the horse occupies a special place. In this article, a comparative analysis of the image of a horse in Russian and Kabardian poetry is per-formed. The results of a comparative analysis of the national-cultural specifics of the image of a horse based on the material of the Russian and Adyghe languages are presented, a variety of hip-pological motives related to issues of fatalism and freedom, ethics and aesthetics, as well as hu-man environmental consciousness are considered. Figurative comparisons of the horse in Kabard-ian and Russian poetry, regardless of their genetic relationship, contribute to the identification of similar and different features, especially their organization and functioning. The conclusion is made about the important role of the image of the horse in Russian and Kabardino-Circassian po-etry, since the horse is a long-time faithful companion of human life, it is a complex, multifaceted and not completely clear symbol.

Sun vs Moon in the Mythopoetic Picture of the World of the Udmurt Bilingual Poet Vyacheslav Ar-Sergi

The Russian-language creativity of national authors is one of the most relevant topics of modern research. The issue of the preserving their identity in a different language field is complex and is ambiguously covered in the scientific literature. The matter of manifestation of ethno-cultural markers in their Russian creativity is no less important. Based on the questions posed, the aim of the article was to study the imagery (on the material of Russian poetry by the Udmurt writer Vyacheslav Ar-Sergi). The analysis of his creative works is carried out on the examples of the imagines of the Sun and the Moon, which more accurately indicate the uniqueness of the religious and mythological thinking of the ethnos, as well as the level of interpenetration of different literary layers. We have found out that the dominate place is occupied by the imagine of the Sun personifying the Supreme God - Inmar in the Udmurt picture of the world. The Sun is often opposed to the Moon in Udmurt mythology. The comparative analysis has shown that the images of heavenly bodies are differently presented in the Russian-language works of V. Ar-Sergi. We have established that the Sun personifies life, rebirth, and the Moon becomes the embodiment of the mental state of lyrical subjects. Our research confirms that, in his Russian-language poetry, V. Ar-Sergi continues to broadcast intraethnic plots correlated with the narratives of world literature, mythology, culture.

Semantic Horizons of the Poetics of the Visible in a Literary Text

The article considers a monograph by Professor Galina Kozubovskaya Russian Literature and the Poetics of the Visible (2021), devoted to the diverse artistic functions of verbal painting in Russian poetry and prose of the XIXth century. The article describes analytical tools and scientific logic, with the help of which the literary critic scrupulously and successfully explores the phenomenon of the visible. It is shown how different techniques of landscape verbal painting, costume poetics, food motifs help, on the one hand, to detect the tenacious observation of the masters of the word, their ability to build an image plan in the text, and, on the other hand, to focus the readers attention on the creative reconstruction of the archetypes of mythological consciousness and traces of literary tradition flickering in the text.

Реализация традиционных образов сравнения компаративных тропов с диминутивными дендронимами в русской поэзии XIX–XXI веков

The article examines the traditional images of comparison, characterizing diminutive dendronyms in the language of the Russian poetry of the 19–21st centuries, from the perspective of the relationship of ‘cultural-stereotypical (traditional) – author’s individual’. The analysis of 725 fragments from the Russian poetic works of the 19–21st centuries reveals the ways of word formation and the composition of diminutive dendronyms, as well as the composition of folk poetic, general poetic and individual author’s images of comparative tropes representing these diminutives as subjects of comparison: girl; love attraction, longing; to cry (tears), to grieve, to yearn; fertility; separation; bitter, unhappy fate, orphanhood; gold, silver; emerald; smoke; clothing; fire; pattern, mesh product; infantas by Velasquez, ermine coat; calico; fidelity. The referencedenotative features of the corresponding realia, motivating the choice of figurative associations are determined: a thin trunk, flexible branches, serrated, heart-shaped leaves, flowering trees, fruit trees. The techniques that help make stereotypical images of comparison in the Russian poetic language individualized are established: the inclusion in the composition of an extended anthropomorphic metaphor; updating by means of occasional epithets, lexical variation of the components of the trope. The stable semantic connotations of diminutive dendronyms are singled out: ‘shy’, ‘timid’, ‘meek’, ‘slender’, ‘tall’, ‘gentle’, ‘curls’, ‘braids’, ‘thin figure’, ‘beauty’, ‘breasts’, ‘captivate’, ‘innocence’, as well as the ways of their representation in poetic contexts: extended metaphors ‘autumnal withering of a tree – withering of female beauty’; memories of the lyrical hero about close people; parallelism of the images of a tree and a human condition; conventional epithets (weeping, bitter); features of the situation of a literary text. The results of the study allow us to improve the understanding of how comparative tropes with diminutive dendronyms develop dynamically in the Russian poetic language.

Образ китайской поэзии в переводах В. Перелешина

The research aims to determine how the image of Chinese poetry is created in V. Pereleshin’s translations and to identify the key features of his cultural dialogue with China. The paper is devoted to the analysis of the image of Chinese poetry in translations by V. Pereleshin, mainly involving the materials of his anthology of translations of Chinese classical poetry “Poems on the Fan” and autographs of translations of Chinese poems. The peculiarities of Pereleshin’s translations are revealed in terms of the poetic form, translation adequacy, the manifestation of the creative individuality of the translator and in terms of the range of themes of Chinese poetry. The paper substantiates that the compliance with the miniature genre of Chinese poetry and the strict rhyming of Russian poetry is a distinctive feature of Pereleshin’s poetic translations. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the paper is the first to conduct a detailed comparative study of the image of Chinese poetry in translations by V. Pereleshin as a representative of the Far Eastern branch of Russian literature in the synthesis of two scientific approaches: Russian literary criticism and studies of the Chinese literary tradition. As a result, it has been proved that the vivid image of Chinese classical poetry created by Pereleshin gives a general view of the form, content and range of themes of shi and ci poems and leads to the understanding of the cultural dialogue of Russian émigré poets with China.

ОБРЕТЕНИЕ СОБЫТИЙНОСТИ В РУССКОЙ НЕКАНОНИЧЕСКОЙ ИДИЛЛИИ

The article offers a solution to the problem of eventfulness, characteristic for the poetic idyll in Russian poetry of the XIX–XXI centuries. Due to a shift in emphasis in the perception of idyllic heritage, а number of scholars define this genre as “eventless”. In particular, it is the idyll in the non-canonical era that is used by a number of poets as a sign of a “consummate word”, which is usually disintegrated in genre struggle for the right to complete a lyrical whole. In this case poems, using idyllic topoi, as a rule, are completed according to the models of other lyrical genres, such as elegies, epistles, ballads. However, there is a creative strategy for employing idyll, in which the eventfulness characteristic of the genre turns out to be found as a result of genre struggle. In this case, an idyllic event of value fusion, the coincidence of poetic consciousness with the world, passing through the test of the plot of other lyrical genres, is found in the event of a lyrical utterance. The elimination of the boundary between the inner and outer worlds (which is predestined in the canonical idyll and found in the non- canonical one) can be considered as the stem of the genre that survived the canon, unlike other genre conventions that turned out to be optional. At the same time, the non-canonical version of the implementation of the idyllic perspective of the worldview is a short moment of peace, won from the non-idyllic world, which one wants to repeat. Reflection performs a destructive function in a collision with a predetermined “ready-made word” of the genre, but it turns out to be able to pronounce it anew as a proper word, exposing its eventfulness. It is the nakedness of the specific eventfulness of the idyll that becomes a distinctive feature of the genre in the non-canonical era.

Almanacs of the late XVIII<sup>th</sup> – first half of the XIX<sup>th</sup> centuries in the funds of the state museum-estate of V.G. Belinskiy

The publication contains a list of literary almanacs presented in the fund collections of the State Museum-Estate of V.G. Belinskiy. The authors reveal the role of publications of this type in the popularization of Russian poetry and prose of the late XVIIIth first half of the XIXth Centuries, give an assessment of the degree of rarity of certain copies, the presence of inscriptions in the them, marginal notes and stamps of the previous owners. The article highlights the importance of almanacs as a source of study of the great critics creative heritage as well as museum exhibits which reveal peculiarities of this period in the history of Russian literature.

Тhe cultural concept GOLD/GOLDEN in the poetic works of A.S.Pushkin

The article presents the analysis of the poetic works of A.S. Pushkin in the aspect of using the linguocultural concept GOLD/GOLDEN in them. The relevant theoretical basis for the study of the term concept of this notion in cognitive and cultural terms is considered. The paper uses the methods of continuous sampling of factual material and the method of cognitive analysis. The stages of experimental research of the lingual embodiment of this concept in lexicography and in Pushkin's works are determined. The high frequency of this concept in the poetic texts of Alexander Pushkin determined the relevance of the study. The key word of the concept "gold" has both direct and figurative meaning in the studied texts. The paper analyzes the contexts illustrating both types of values. Analysis of the contextual figurative meanings of the word "golden" made it possible to describe the features of creating positive and negative connotations, to convey the variety of presentation of color lexemes, to characterize their generalized symbolic meaning. Cases of expanding the semantics of color designation, its figurative use, when the color adjective becomes multifaceted and ambiguous, are revealed. Our study allows us to conclude that the concept of GOLD / GOLD, verbalized in the poetic work of A.S. Pushkin, makes a significant contribution to the creation of a generally positive, vibrant atmosphere of his poetry. Key words: Russian poetry, cultural concept, gold, symbol, color image, color semantics.

The Poetics of Color “Cattleya Labiata” in the Lyrics by Vladimir Nabokov: Data from the Dictionary of Lexical Combinations

Purpose. The study is devoted to the description of the poetic world of V. V. Nabokov-lyricist, more precisely – its color fullness on the example of purple. The method of multidimensional lexicographic description of the color aspect of Nabokov's poetic world is proposed. The presented article offers observations on the dictionary of lexical combinations with a color component, the data for which were obtained using the original software system “Hypertext Search for Companion-words in Author’s Texts”.Results. The use of the software package makes it possible to find stable groups of lexemes in the works of a poet, “passing” from poem to poem. Tokens are adjacent to each other at some distance and usually do not show obvious connections between themselves. These are lexical combinations. They mark common language, general poetic and individual author associations that arise unconsciously in authors. Some of purple’s satellites are obviously attracted by the sound. Purple partners organize the space, emphasizing the top of the vertical and outlining the horizontal landscape; indicate the time; note the presence of plants and humans, mark mystical (religious) consciousness. The properties and characteristics of objects and phenomena associated with purple are due to the play of light. A positive emotional state associated with purple is obvious.Conclusion. In his “purple” lexical combinations Nabokov follows the golden age of Russian poetry, describing the celestial sphere or characterizing the earth's surface, but radically diverges, transferring this color association to the plant world, the mystical region and man. The proximity of purple to God or Russian, as well as to the characteristics of a cheerful disposition, is Nabokov’s idiosyncrasy.

Комикс-культура как прецедентный мир русского рэпа

The article represents an experience in interpreting Russian rap in terms of precedentiality. The texts of comics culture are considered as precedents, namely numerous Anglo-American works published in the form of graphic novels (comics), then films, computer games, as well as various visual materials (advertising posters, placards) and plastic toys. As a result, a number of universes have been introduced into the cultural circulation of a modern man in which superheroes, their retinues and antagonists operate, as well as those whom these superheroes with their supernatural abilities protect. It is shown that the precedent world of comics culture in Russian rap is manifested in onomasticon and rap texts. About a dozen names of rappers and bands are given, whose nicknames refer to the culture in question, the motives for their choice are analyzed, how they are explained by their bearers, for example, the history of the nickname Scryptonite. The analysis of rap texts has allowed to identify those features of comics culture that are reflected in them in the form of precedent phenomena, including the chronotope, the circle of characters and the objective world. It is shown that their presence in the texts of Russian rap solves a number of stylistic problems; elements of the precedent world act as standards of various properties, qualities, and atmosphere. The presence of this precedent world in Russian rap expands its linguistic and cultural horizons and promotes the realization of creativity characteristic of Russian rappers. It is emphasized that comics culture as a precedent world coexists in Russian rap along with other cultural worlds —Russian poetry, ancient mythology, technology, sports, etc., which makes it a reflection of modern culture and at the same time a means of its complexity and polyphony.

Арарат — главный паттерн армянского текста в русской поэзии

The paper explores the current direction of modern literary criticism — local texts, in particular — the Armenian text in Russian poetry. The purpose of the presented study is to determine the range of associative images that arise in the mind of a modern person around the lexical token “Armenia”. The authors conducted a survey of respondents in one of the social networks. One hundred and ten responses (mostly representatives of the academic, intellectual environment, with a reader's background) became the basis for statistical analysis. The most common answer came to be the word “Ararat”. In the verbal culture Ararat has become an image and pattern of the Armenian text. The authors analyzed semantic and functional levels of this image basing on the poems by Russian poets of the 20–21 centuries (in alphabetical order): M. Amelin, P. Antokolsky, V. Bryusov, Y. Veselovsky, A. Gaspari, A. Gitovich, E. Yevtushenko, V. Zvyagintseva, R. Ivnev, V. Inber, G. Kubatyan, I. Lisnyanskaya, O. Mandelstam, M. Matusovsky, B. Slutsky and B. Chichebabin. In the present paper the works on fixing the semantic universe of experimental by researchers V. Nalimov and Zh. Drogalina became the basis for constructing methodological analytics, as well as G. Garipova's research on meta-consciousness reflected in the literary text. Research methods included generalization and systematization of the obtained data, quantitative method, mythopoetic method, philological analysis of the text. As a result, the authors of the article talk about the semantic field of the Armenian text, in which the Ararat acts as the paramount pattern — in the individual and general cultural picture of the world. The material of the study may serve as an algorithm for working with other patterns of the Armenian text, information about which is present in the statistical calculations.

Единицы лексико-семантической группы «Поиск и получение информации» как олицетворяющие метафоры в русской поэзии

The article analyzes a fragment of the metaphorical system in the language of Russian poetry from the 19th to 21st centuries. Specifically, the analysis focuses on personifying metaphors related to the semantic class of ‘Language and speech’ and the lexical-semantic group Information search and receipt’. The study aims to determine the functioning of these lexical units in Russian poetry, identify the semantic classes of the objects of personification they are combined with, and establish their role in the organisation of the poetic text and connection with the poet's worldview. The research uses the Poetic Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus as its material and employs corpus, semantic field, and structural-functional analysis methods. The results show a higher frequency of words with the meaning ‘Information receipt than Information search’ as personifiers, with varying distribution over the comparison of ‘question-answer’ images. The analyzed figurative language introduces dialogism into the text, particularly through question-answer constructions with imperative and address, direct and indirect speech, creating unity and increasing dialogicity. The role of such constructions in organizing the internal dialogue and formulating the poet's worldview attitudes is revealed.

Kuban State University: Russian Philology on the 45th Parallel

The article represents the history and modernity of philological scholarship in Kuban State University, the oldest university of classical education in the south of Russia, which has been preserving and developing the traditions in the sphere of education, science and social and educational activity since 1920. The authors describe the principal directions of philology development at the faculty: teaching Russian language and literature, academic research work in the field of literary studies, the history of Russian literature from its beginning up to present times, including literature of Russian expatriate community, literature of the peoples of Russia, literary regional studies, literary criticism, folklore studies, etc. One of the main directions of the research activities which the scholars have chosen is the search and comparison of the universal and nationally specific in the works of foreign and Russian poetry and prose. The problems of contemporary Russian language are discussed in the research and development project “Russian language potential”. The scholars of Kuban State University devote a lot of attention to studying Russian language from the perspective of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, cross-cultural communication, sociolinguistics, terminology studies, discourse theory. The leading idea of scholarly interests of professors and associate professors is the theme of “Linguoaxiology”, revealing a valuable component of Russian language unit and Russian discourse field. It’s necessary to point out that the research of linguistic and methodological basic training of Russian as а Foreign language/Russian as Non-Native language, the training of specialists in this field, questions of linguo-didactic testing in Krasnodar region are carried out only at the department of Russian as а Foreign language at the Kuban State University. The scholars deal with the description of the semantics of Russian language, study the regional cultural component of onomastics and problems of language policy. The development and teaching of Russian as а foreign language are also aimed at the perception of the uniqueness of Russian civilization. Russian philology on the 45th parallel is trying to preserve and develop the world of the Russian word, and the Russian world as a concept containing natural bounds of language, mentality and culture.

Иван Гончаров как объект поэтический рефлексии

The paper presents an analysis of references to I. A. Goncharov in Russian poetry. The study materials were poetic works from the beginning of the 1850s to the second half of the twentieth century, in which the name of the writer is mentioned. The research did not deal with the texts containing only references to the works of I. A. Goncharov. The “Goncharov” poetic subcorpus does not record an assessment of the creative manner of the writer, and with rare exceptions (N. A. Nekrasov) his famous novels are not mentioned. Russian poetry addresses Goncharov primarily not as a writer, but as a writer involved in public life. In poems, he appears first of all as a traveler and the author of the essays “Frigate Pallada”, and secondly as a participant in literary battles, censor and editor. As a novelist, he attracts the attention of poets not from the artistic, but from the commercial side, since his contemporaries were haunted by his high fees. There are warm mentions of Goncharov as a friend and teacher, including faceless odic enthusiastic assessments. In the poem by D. D. Minaev, I. A. Goncharov is portrayed already as a parody character, placed in hell and endowed with Oblomov features.