Symbol in a Poetic Text: New Opportunities for Interpretation

The article proposes one of the possible solutions to the interpretational problem of the symbol. Against the background of the active involvement of exact methods to the analysis of works of art in modern philology, the original software system "Hypertext Search for Companion-Words in Author's Texts" can be used to identify the meanings of symbols actualized in the text. The processing of data obtained with the help of the system does not abolish the use of other traditional methods of analyzing the figurative system or interpreting single symbols, but involves a narrower circle of symbolic meanings that can be purposefully understood. The material of the study was the lyrics of Vyacheslav Ivanov, one of the most consistent and authoritative representatives of Russian symbolism, as well as all the lyrics of post-Symbolist poets Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam. As an example, the authors analyze how a common animal symbol of the horse functions in the lyrics of these three poets. The images of a winged horse, a pale horse, and a sea horse, frequent in Ivanov's texts, are interpreted via figuratively-motivated situations of experiencing passions: poetic inspiration is an ecstatic impulse beyond the established borders, death is a punishment for non-humility and self-indulgence. The analysis of the horse's "satellites" in Ivanov's texts, which constitute repeated lexical combinations revealed by the software system, showed that the minimal themes of the sea in the horse thematic halo are fewer than one might expect; there are more themes of the sky. Along with the dynamic movement motif, the acoustic sound motif is noticeable. The observed minimal themes of religious religion make it possible to assert that, at the pretext level, the horse is no longer associated with dangerous impulses to the forbidden, but with creative sublime aspirations. The catharsis-generating tension between the evident (spontaneous, dark, forbidden, dangerous) and the hidden (elevated, free, necessary, triumphant) determines the polyphony of both the individual symbol and Ivanov's poetry as a whole. The comparison of the functioning of the horse in the work of the Symbolists and post-Symbolists shows that the Symbolists exclusively form the image-symbol actualizing all new contexts of meanings, which may not always be obvious and are detected and accentuated through the use of the specialized software package. With similar methods of research, other authors show non-obvious intra- and intertextual links reflecting the peculiarities of the authors' language personalities, their poetic world and associative thinking. In the case of the Symbolists, the "satellites" of the image-symbol are the out-of-sight "nodes of one crystal lattice", which in their totality form a single system of symbolic meanings.

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