The word den' in N.M. Yazykov's poetic worldview

Abstract

The article analyzes the usage of the temporal lexeme den’ (‘day’) by N.M. Yazykov, a romanticist poet and a contemporary of A.S. Pushkin, with the help of the methods of contextual analysis, component analysis, and literary text interpretation. It was revealed that N.M. Yazykov used this word to name a part of a day (from morning to evening), a time interval (24 hours), and a calendar date. In most contexts under study, the word den’ has the plural form dni (‘days’) and the meaning of “time”. Various tropes (metaphor, personification, and epithet) were identified. The poet used them to describe natural landscapes, as well as the inner world, thoughts, doubts, experiences of his lyric characters. Furthermore, he turned them into a stylistic device (gradation, antithesis) by placing the word den’ with other temporal lexemes. Due to the metaphorical transformations and the author’s individual perception, the stylistically neutral word den’ acquires various connotative shades in N.M. Yazykov’s poems. The analysis of the semantics and valency of this word demonstrates that N.M. Yazykov’s worldview is characterized by a feeling of the transience of time, its swiftness, and the past is considered brighter than the present. The study adds substantially to our understanding of the specifics of the poet’s perception of time and his worldview.

Keywords

• vremya (‘time’)
• den’ (‘day’)
• temporal words
• poetic text
• n.m. yazykov