Poetic typology of Letov’s and Mayakovsky’s lyrics: from world model to language

The aim of the work is to describe typological convergences between the lyrics of Mayakovsky and Letov in the linguistic and world-modeling aspects. The material of the study is Letov’s and Mayakovsky’s lyrics, the subject of the work are the mechanisms of the poetic language conditionality by the world model. The main method used is structural-typological comparison. The author differentiates the terms “world model” and “world image” in the theoretical part of the article: it is assumed that world model is a kind of a general scheme (frame or gestalt) which, being actualized in different cultural and philosophical “codes”, forms various world images. Typological analysis should be done at a world-model level since the world model allows to see one poetics type through the diversity of its cultural and philosophical representations (while analysis of world images allows to detect individual “deviations” of poetics from this general type). The main theoretical hypothesis of the article is the assumption that the key structures of the world model are images of body and space. These concrete concepts encode complex and abstract relations between the human and the world. They are manifested at semantic and grammatical levels simultaneously and perform the constructive function in texts. The form-forming function of the world model in relation to poetic semantics and grammar was determined in the practical part of the work on the basis of the analysis of Letov’s and Mayakovsky’s lyrics. The research shows that the primary conflict “human vs world” is expressed in the elementary opposition “body vs confining space” at a semantic level. The main intention of the persona is to go beyond the confining space. This is done in two ways: through the construction of a new utopian space (without boundaries) and through the creation of a new “fluid” corporeality related to this space. The disappearance of the boundary between the body and the world semantically marks the neutralization of the boundary between the subject and the object, which elicits the appearance of the Anthropos archetype in Letov’s and Mayakovsky’s lyrics. This archetype represents a return to the early ontogenetic stages of psychological development, as a result of which a specific model is formed where the body and space are identical. This model sets a propositional-grammatical structure which determines some features of the syntagmatic text structure and specific semiotic mechanisms of metaphorization in the poetry of Letov and Mayakovsky. Thus, the blending of the external and the internal generates the non-topical subject, which destroys the deictic reference and leads to syntactic incompleteness and agrammatisms. The body’s permeable boundary, which appears as a result of this blending, also generates a specific metaphorical frame where space and body are fused together. The suffering body image with a permeable boundary, in turn, is associated with the expressed metaphor which, indicating the affect state, shows the expanding emotion that “tears” the body.

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