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Abstract: From the standpoint of historical poetics, the article explores the functioning of psychological parallelism in the lyric poetry of the contemporary poets Sergey Petrov (1911–1988) and Veniamin Blazhenny (1921–1999), which serves to equate natural processes with human life. The paper argues that the semantic halo in the works of both poets is extremely stable and is determined by the poetic model of the world based on the universality of suffering. Its specificity, namely, the complex of motifs represented with the help of parallelism and similar types of figurativeness (symbol-apposition and instrumental case with the meaning of metamorphosis), is the object of research. Thus, in the poems by Petrov, estrangement from the positive principles of life, gaining involvement in life through pain experience, and the depletion of personal being and the universal “substance of existence” are deeply rooted in parallelism. The perception of the idea of immortality as a utopian one aggravates the feeling of “leakage of life”, and what has been said about the world, with its exhaustion and decrepitude, also applies to the lyrical subject. The poems by Blazhenny are practically “permeated” with the scenes of torment and deaths of animals, afterlife visions, accusations against God the Father and compassion for God the Son, and, via the parallelism based imagery, the poet asserts the desire to live, which unites human beings with the nature. At the same time, living in the poetic world of Blazhenny means to necessarily cause pain to “another person” (even God in the hypostasis of the Father often turns out to be an “executioner”), hence the mobility of subject boundaries, which is caused not only by suffering and torment, but also by compassion. The perception of reality as syncretic predetermines the fate of the poetic word, which, becoming a continuation of the subject, is consistently reified by both authors: aging and becoming unusable, the word loses its ability to be the writer’s existential support. Therefore, in the lyric poetry by Petrov and Blazhenny, whose artistic systems can be considered typologically related, psychological parallelism ascertains the idea of vulnerability and riskiness of human position in the universe, which is characteristic of the non-classical era, rather than the harmonious “embeddedness” of human beings in nature.

About the author(s) :

Aleksey S. Bokarev
Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K. D. Ushinsky (Yaroslavl, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8771-6065

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 26.02.2023; date of publication: 30.06.2023

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