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Abstract: The present article addresses the interpretation of two poems written by Osip Mandelstam in 1936, namely “The law of pine grove…” (“Sosnovoy roshchitsy zakon…”) and “The bristles of sleepiness…” (“Plastinkoi tonen’koi zhilleta”). Rhythmic and lexical “conflicts” in the poem tissue (E. Etkind) and various types of reiterations act as a key to poem interpretation. It is they that contribute to the actualization of the motif of parting and various female names, including Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, as well as women-characters of literary works (Tatyana Larina, Minvana) in the semantic field of these two poems. Eventually the parting scene, which is repeated in the context over and over again (parting with Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, Arminius and Minvana’s partings, and Tatiana Larina’s farewell to her native places), develops into the parting act of the lyrical character with their past filled with harmony. The rhythmic conflicts of the poem enable the reader to conclude that Mandelstam’s poem “The bristles of sleepiness…” reconstructs the rhythm of “Onegin stanza”, in which the author changed the rhyme sequence fixed in it. As a result, there emerges the effect of the presence of Pushkin’s harmony between its lines. Similarly to this implicit presence of Pushkin’s harmony, the sea noise which was so dear to the poet and which he was irretrievably deprived of is heard in the sound of wind in Mandelstam’s trees. The “Feminine” theme in the poetic world of a poem acts as a component which softens the shared sense of trouble and reconciles with what is happening. The article also makes an assumption that the two poems make up one lyrical cycle (among other things, the metaplot of the growth of the trees is traced throughout the first poem to the second one).

About the author(s) :

Liliya D. Gutrina
Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia).
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5083-9299

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 29.03.2021; date of publication: 30.06.2021.

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