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Abstract: For the first time in Russian and Western literary criticism, the article examines different variants of the organization of lyrical narration in German-language poems beginning with “als”, which acts as a structure-forming initial component in these lyrical texts. The inclusion of a conjunction in the title of the poem is connected with the Baroque tradition, according to which the title conveys a summary of the poetic text (Thomas, Neumark, Gryphius, Weise). Sometimes subordinate clauses become the structure-forming anaphora of a poem (Borchert, Brecht, Ausländer, Wiemer, Sielaff, etc.). Poems are considered in chronological sequence from the Middle Ages to the present in such genres as song and sonnet, elegy and spruch, ode and parable, etc. The popularity of the genre is noted in the Baroque period and the Enlightenment, in which entertainment and teaching functions predominate (Fleming, Brockes, Goethe, etc.). Romantics and post-romantics, with their sonnets, romances, landscape and love poems, continued the line of narrative poetry, full of poetic fictions and distinguished by musicality and sonority (A. W. Schlegel, Heine, etc.). The poetry of the 19th–20th centuries also demonstrates a narrative orientation associated not only with the feelings experienced by the lyrical hero and the events of their private life, but also historical and political events. Among the authors of such poems, Brecht and Becher, who are prone to lyrical narration, stand out. The main lyrical plots of such poems were stories about childhood, about becoming a hero, love stories, secular and political events, literary and mythological stories, dreams and extraordinary events. In the poetry of the post-war period, a special genre of poetry with “als” is developing, in which biographical events are connected with historical data (W. Borchert, R. O. Wiemer, H. Kalau, H. M. Novak). The study uses historical-literary and comparative methods that allow the author to identify such plots recurring through centuries as the biography of a lyrical character with the motif “when I was a child”, an important event in the life of the character or people close to them in the genre of “occasional poems”, and the biography of the entire generation depending on time. In modern poetry, poems with “als” are less common, which can be attributed to the rejection of the use of traditional lyrical genres of a narrative nature (ballad, ode, elegy, etc.) and the preference for mixed genres without an explicit lyrical plot.

About the author(s) :

Tatiana N. Andreiushkina

Togliatti State University (Togliatti, Russia)

ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2818-983X

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 17.03.2025; date of publication: 30.06.2025

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