Syncretic Imagery in the Poetry by Vladimir Strochkov and Aleksandr Levin

This article considers imaginative syncretism, ascending to the language archaic, as a complex presentation of several semantic features in a single word. This concept incorporates phenomena such as polysemy, homonymy, compounding, blending, conversion, and other cases of language compression. Its main feature is implementing different meanings of a word or a form in a single speech act, in which the context does not eliminate, but, on the contrary, produces uncertainty. The object of the study is the specifics of the picture of the world in the lyrics of modern poets Vladimir Strochkov and Aleksandr Levin, namely, the complex of motifs represented using syncretic imagery. The article shows that Strochkov’s syncretism manifests the motif of reality disintegration, which is invariant in his poems: the author thematises the end of existence, the feeling of exhausted time, and the extinction of the poetic talent. To fix the discrete world that constantly changes its image, Strochkov uses specific language means: text re-segmentation, blending, homonymy, paronymy, enantiosemy (the latter can be both linguistic and occasional). This results in illusiveness, the true or imaginary irreality of everything directly visible. The author always interprets the contact of the lyrical character with the reality as painful. In Levin’s lyrics, the syncretic imagery serves the motifs coming back to Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and carnivalisation of literature. The most frequent motif-the continuous “formation of life”-is understood as the emergence of new entities immediately from the language (by compounding, blending, substantivation, rethinking of stable concepts). The characters’ behaviour resembles the carnival mesalliances Bakhtin described: due to grammatical transformations, the border between man and nature, organics and inorganics becomes extremely unsteady. In Levin’s lyrics, the real world with its burden is profaned, whereas language is asserted as the inexhaustible source of life. The detailed analysis of poems by Strochkov and Levin allows claiming that syncretic imagery in the poetics of modality can serve different tasks; however, if ancient syncretism was a premise of knowledge and of phenomena differentiation, its modern counterpart-neosyncretism-casts doubt on knowing phenomena and points to the total revision of the world undertaken by poetic consciousness.

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