The great potential of a small poem by J. Brodsky (“The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad...”)
Bogdanova Olga Vladimirovna, Baranova Tatiana Nikolaevna
A. I. Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University; F. M. Dostoevsky Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy
Submitted: 01.05.2023
Abstract. The article is devoted to the analysis of J. Brodsky’s poem “The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad...” (1958), well-known, but previously little subjected to detailed philological analysis. The research is undertaken in order to identify the features of the ideological position of the poem’s persona and to trace the universal intentions in the interpretation of the theme of the people proposed by the poet, to comprehend the role of the national theme in the formation of the poetic world of both early and late Brodsky. The researchers explicate intertextual subtexts in the poem “The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad...” and identify constants of a special – “Brodskian” – worldview. It is shown that the semantic content of the poetic narrative in “The Jewish cemetery...” rises above the personal memories of the persona (the author’s alter ego) and turns out to be addressed not so much to the national constants of the tragic fate of the Jewish people, as to the fate and history of all mankind. The national is subordinated to the universal, the subjective and the particular is subordinated to the objective and the general. The research is novel in that it is the first to emphasize the national aspects of the theme of the people, to trace the conditions for the emergence of the motifs of death, time and immortality that are recurrent for Brodsky. As a result, it has been shown that the impulse of the persona’s philosophical mood in the early analyzed poem is correlated with a deep comprehension of the philosophical problems of the poet’s later works, represented by him in the individual style of the so-called “big poems”.
Key words and phrases: И. Бродский, стихотворение «Еврейское кладбище около Ленинграда…», интертекст, национальное и универсальное, мотивы смерти, бессмертия, времени, J. Brodsky, poem “The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad...”, intertext, national and universal, motifs of death, immortality, time
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