Yu. Vella’s book Talk to Me as a stylistic harmony: Composition and architectonics

This study of the composition and architectonics of Talk to Me, a poetry and prose book by Yuri Vella, aims to reveal the stylistic harmony of the texts brought under one cover, taking into account the system of values and mythopoetics of works by Vella, a Nenets author. For this purpose, I brought archetypal dominants of the Nenets cultural tradition up to date based on ethnographic, historical, and philological scientific sources. Research on the theory and analysis of book-making in Russian poetry by M.N. Darwin, Yu.B. Orlitskii, I.V. Fomenko, O.V. Miroshnikova, and others became a methodological basis for the study. I argue that the prosimetric nature of the book-making practice by Vella was determined by the ethnocultural characteristics of his artistic thinking and his experience in mastering Nenets folklore in prosaic and poetic form through the mediation of his grandmother Nenga. I identified the following compositional and genre features of Vella’s fourth book: (a) a wide variety of text types (traditional prosody and vers libre, flash fiction and small stories in prose, translations and ethnographic works by the author, etc.); (b) polylingual design of the series of publications under the same name with programmatic texts translated into the main European languages; (c) the circular structure of the book with the title and the final story called “Talk to Me”; (d) thematic titles which build up the semantic space of “our” world; (e) the stylistic harmony and triptychs of the book are characterized by number symbolism which is typical of the Nenets mythology. I argue that all these structural components express the mythopoetic picture of the world and the poet’s “circular way of thinking” in the context of his traditional national culture (see “The Highest Form of Harmony”). Moreover, the book under consideration does not prioritize the assertion of the values of “our” world under the threat of losing its national identity as a result of globalization in the Soviet and post-Soviet period (books News from the Camping Ground, White Screams, Triptychs). It rather considers the phenomenon of the Nenets culture and the spiritual experience of its highly respected representative as internationally significant socio-humanistic phenomena. Therefore, Vella positions the book Talk to Me as a space for an interethnic dialogue aiming to actualize universal human spiritual values and preserve the uniqueness of one of the small-numbered peoples of the Tyumen North.

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