On the problem of “physiological” poetics in the typological aspect: O. Mandelstam and S. Weöres

The paper deals with individual meanings of the “physiological” approach in modern literary criticism and in the articles of O. Mandelstam. For the poet, “physiological” was the “infinite complexity” of all organic. In addition, we seek to apply this approach to analyze the poetics of both the Russian and Hungarian poets. Therefore, the origin and development of the concept of physiology in Mandelstam’s articles of the 1910s - 1920s is considered in detail. Both poets shared a sensory hypersensitivity to the phenomenon of corporeality and to the sensual diversity of their surroundings. Following the aesthetic quest of late modernism, both poets tried to dissolve their lyrical “I” both in the dynamically perceived perceptible world and through generating and complicating the spatial superstructure of the poetic word. Mandelstam’s ideas about the physiology of creative work developed under the influence of A. Bergson’s philosophy of life, while S. Weöres was fond of “Eastern philosophy” and Taoism in particular. In terms of poetics, these common aspirations led both authors to develop sensitivity to the materiality of language and the word in its sound and written forms, especially in the aspect of the textile palpability of the text, as well as to the expansion of the intertextual and intratextual meanings of the word. An abundant flow of perception (auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, interoceptive) of the poets’ lyrical heroes is embodied in the word in order to construct a text that plays with metaphors and paronomasia.

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