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Abstract: The article poses a hypothesis about an organic polylogue of cultures, facilitating the synthesis of Slavic and Shor folk-poetic traditions in the depiction of the taiga in the poems of representatives of the Kemerovo poetic school. The taiga text, in the development of which cosmogonic and eschatological motifs are intricately intertwined, becomes one of the metatextual structures that ensure the axiological unity of the creative principles of Kuzbass poets. This can be seen in the study of the lyrical systems of L. Gerzhidovich and T. Tudegesheva, which are rooted in different ethnocultural codes but united by the motif of the call of the taiga and the aspiration to merge with its world. A mythopoetic analysis of the imagery of the taiga in the poems by the authors under study reveals the motif and thematic diversity characteristic of the poetic functioning of the Kuznetsk text: from the celebration of love for the native land and its nature to lyrical and philosophical meditations on the fate of the world and humanity; it also allows one to identify their lyrical characters as bearers of a mystical connection with the soul of the taiga. Both authors share a lyrical experience of a resurrecting kind of unity with the taiga, which is combined with a sense of the impending doom of the taiga world due to humanity’s predatory and consumerist attitude towards nature. This is what gives rise not only to the ecological issues but also to the close attention paid to the artistic detail in the taiga text and to the animism in the depiction of birch, cedar, meadowsweet, candyk, corncrake, nightingale, wolf, lynx, rivers, mountains, and so on. A separate aspect of the manifestation of mythopoetics of the taiga is the appeal to the realm of nature spirits and sacred topos. And while Gerzhidovich’s works feature familiar figures from Russian folklore – the Leshy, water-nymph, and the depiction of the taiga as a temple – Tudegesheva’s work offers a more developed range of spirits from Shor mythology. As a result, her poems include not only Russian-language names for these spirits, such as “mountain girls” and “mistress / master of the mountain,” but also Turkic-language ones – Tag-eezi Tor, Ayna, Pay-kazyn, and others – as well as the actualization of legends in the poetic symbolism of Mountain Shoria, the Mustag and Chedygys mountains, and the Tom River.

About the author(s) :

Natalia V. Nalegach

Kemerovo State University (Kemerovo, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1214-7363

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 23.08.2026; date of publication: 31.10.2026

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