Historico-poetic aspects of a ballad dialogue (A case study of Boris Slutsky's "Ballad on a Dogmatist")

By example of one of the significant pieces from Boris Slutsky's oeuvre, the author of the paper considers a characteristic case of the poet's intention to transform the dialogue-role structure, an inherent element of the classical ballad. The interpretation of changes, explanation of their reasons, answering the question whether these changes were occasional or willful required the attraction of representative sources - the paragons of folk and literary ballads. In the latter case, it seemed logical to compare the examined text with exemplary Zhukovsky's variations of Burger's "Lenore" plot, which, in particular, led the author to a preliminary classification of "Zhukovsky's text" in Slutsky's poetry. The key thesis of the present work, which is primarily devoted to the poetics of a dialogue, is the notion that the mature Slutsky's ballad text experiences a conspicuous deformation within its role-dialogue interaction. The historical poetics of the ballad genre, in which its heroes' personal individualism justifiability is put to test, prompts that the role of Providence, a kind of an extra-personal reason, in whose perspective the reader is able to assess the consistency of personages' ambitions, the true or false character of their life aims, will be a marked position in characters' interplay. Thus, the role triangle often seen in folk ballads (bride or wife - her mother - groom or husband) allows us to observe in different versions of the plot how personages one by one are verified on his or her devotion to good and truth. In Zhukovsky's "Lyudmila", the heroine's mother and the author himself speak with Providence's voice, which is expressed in rhymes arranged similarly from the lexical viewpoint. The ideological context of the second half of the 20th century strongly distorted the role-dialogue interplay in a ballad. On the contrary to the early examples of the Soviet ballad where the power of ideology was perceived as one of Providence's faces, Slutsky's "Ballad on a Dogmatist" shows in its aesthetic focus the story (although factored out from the events of the plot) of the author's parting with dogma. The structural position earlier occupied by Providence or any force associated with it becomes vacant. As a result, the ballad structure is split, dialogue transforms into a quasi-dialogue as the main hero's figure is seen in the dual perspective of the mutually opposed roles: "bride" and "dead fiance". In the conclusion of the paper, the author - in order to show the general turn of Slut-sky's poetics to the reconstruction of quasi-dialogue situations - analyses three verses bound by the semantics of the "order" ("Big Order", "July was Sultry . . .", "The Order"). In the three texts, as it is shown in the work, one and the same initial concept is "transcribed" with the "languages" of different genres, which turns the original semantic core into a set of juxtaposed homonymous clones with only superficial likeness.

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