Филологический класс (Apr 2020)
The Will of Space and the Flow of Verse. On Akhmadulina’s Poetics of the 1980s (Based on Her Books “The Mystery” and “The Garden”)
Abstract
The paper analyzes Bella Akhmadulina’s poetry of the late 1970s–80s, published in her books “The Mystery” (1983) and “The Garden” (1987). Researchers identify these books as the beginning of her literary maturity. In his review of “The Mystery”, Yu. Kublanovsky stated that the book had singled the poet out of the context of values dominating Soviet culture. Poetics of space is the subject matter of this paper. In contrast to the previous works that addressed this topic, the paper does not analyze the individual topoi, such as “the garden”, “the house” or “the road”, but focuses on space itself as a category of poetic vision, expressed by the semantics of the lexeme “space”, its perception by the poet and the specificity of its prosody. In the poems of the studied period, “space” became the focal point of Akhmadulina’s poetic reflection. It was manifested in the generalization of its semantics and the recurrence of the word in her texts. Space became both the object of reflection and the subject of action. Akhmadulina’s appeal to space expressed her turn to the ontological foundations of values. Analysis of the semantics of the category of space shows that at this stage, it had become a metonymy of the highest principle of Being, which is later identified in the framework of Christianity. Developing the idea of the role of space in Akhmadulina’s poetry, the paper poses a hypothesis that the experience of “space” determines such a prosodic feature of her poems as their relative redundancy, frequently criticized by literary critics. Akhmadulina’s poems of the period develop the motif of the verse and space isomorphism. The duration of verse echoes an endless approach to the mystery of space. An additional foundation for the aesthetic conditioning of verse duration may be found in the phatic function, which is enabled in the structure of poetic communication. It is determined by the specificity of the addressee – the incomprehensible space itself. Keeping in contact with it, i. e. continuing to speak, becomes an intrinsically valuable concern of the speaker. In terms of literary history, Akhmadulina’s concept of space is deeply connected with B. Pasternak’s poetry.
Keywords
