One of the most unusual river islands is Swan Island (Île aux Cygnes) in Paris. But, unlike the islands of Cité and Saint-Louis, guides often forget to mention it. Although in recent years it has become one of the most popular holiday destinations among both Parisians and visitors to the city.
Swan Island... without swans
Swan Island is a breakwater created to protect the river port in the Grenelle region in 1825. And then it was simply called the Dam de Grenelle. A little later it was called Ile de Grenelle. The artificial island is 890 meters long and 18 meters wide at its widest point. In 1830, more than 60 species of trees were planted here. These are mainly poplars, willows and ash trees, which appreciate the proximity of the river. But you can also admire chestnuts, hazel, linden, cedar, maple and other trees. In 1878, a walking alley was landscaped on the island, which was called Swan Alley, and the artificial island was named Swan Alley. In 2012, a sports ground was built in the lower part of the island.
Swan Island received its name from the natural island of the same name, which until the beginning of the 18th century was located between the Seine and University Street. But the left branch of the river was filled up and the small island became part of the Campus Martius. And the swans that lived on the island during the time of King Louis XIV were an expensive amusement brought from Denmark and Sweden in 1676 for “the delight of the king’s eyes.”
Bridge support
Like other islands in Paris, Swan Island was used by engineers as a support for bridges. Three bridges cross it. The first, the Grenelle Bridge, was built in 1827. It stood for only 46 years and, for unknown reasons, collapsed in 1873. A new bridge was built in its place in 1874.
In 1900, before the World Exhibition, the elegant two-level Ruel Bridge was built. And in 1904-1905 - the bridge de Bir-Hakim, then it was called the Passy viaduct, and the breakwater was renamed the island de Passy.
Attractions on the island
In 1889, an 11.5-meter-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty, donated by the Americans in gratitude for France's support of the United States during the War of Independence with the British Empire, was installed on the western part of the island. In the hand of the statue is a sign with symbolic dates: Bastille Day and US Independence Day. Its face is facing America, so it is best viewed from the Mirabeau Bridge. 
At the opposite end is the sculpture “Renaissance of France” by the Dutch master Holger Wederkinch, created in 1930. In addition to these iconic sculptures, you can admire the bas-relief on the stone arch of the Bridge de Bir Hakim. Allegories of Electricity, Commerce, Science and Labor are depicted here.
Another attraction of Swan Island is the magnificent panorama of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower and the original skyscrapers of the Front de Seine business district.
The doctrine of figures of speech arose in ancient rhetoric, where they were divided into figures of thought and figures of speech. The latter also included tropes (metaphors, metonymies, etc.), the so-called figures of rethinking. In modern science, the term “stylistic figures” is more often used. In the broad sense of the word, these are any linguistic means, including tropes that give imagery and expressiveness to speech. In the narrow understanding of figures, paths are excluded from them, in this case they speak of syntactic figures, i.e. syntactic means of expressiveness of speech - repetitions, parallelism, inversion, anaphora, etc.
Trope(Greek tropos– turnover) – the use of a word (statement) in a figurative meaning. Yes, word eagle in its literal meaning - the name of a bird, in its figurative meaning - the name of a person possessing qualities traditionally attributed to an eagle (courage, vigilance, etc.). The trope combines literal meaning and situational meaning related to a given case, which creates an image.
The simplest types of tropes, with fairly erased imagery, are often used in colloquial speech (winter has come, the wind howls, a sea of flowers and so on. – commonly used metaphors; Moscow doesn't believe in tears, not everyone loves Shostakovich, lived until gray hair– commonly used metonymies).
The subject of literary analysis is individual, or author's, tropes. With their help, the aesthetic effect of expressiveness and non-standard words in artistic, oratorical and journalistic speech is achieved.
The number of tropes - their multiplicity, small number or even complete absence in any text - is not an indicator of its artistry. However, the nature of the tropes, their frequency in a particular writer are essential for the study of the author’s artistic thinking, because they constitute the features of his poetics.
In modern science, the composition of tropes is defined in different ways. In a narrow sense, tropes include metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche (as a type of metonymy). This is motivated by the fact that only in these tropes there is a coincidence in one word of direct and figurative meanings. Some researchers expand this series through cases of contrasting changes in the meaning of a word - and then irony, hyperbole and litotes are included in the tropes.
With some reservations, tropes include epithet, comparison, periphrasis, personification, symbol and allegory, which do not always have a tropical (figurative) meaning. For example: rusty voice – tropical (metaphorical) epithet; charming voice is a non-tropical epithet; “under the sky of Schiller and Goethe” is a tropical periphrasis (metonymy).
In the language of modern fiction, there is such a concept as reversibility of tropes, in which one object receives different tropical characteristics, i.e., a comparison turns into a metaphor, a metaphor into a periphrase, etc. For example, in I. Bunin’s story “The Raven” the comparison "my father" was used looked like a raven." Subsequently, the author uses a metaphor (“he was truly perfect crow"), uses metaphorical epithets (" led his crow head", "squinting with shiny crow eyes"), comparison ("he, in a tailcoat, stooped, raven, carefully read... the program"), uses a metaphor in the title "Crow".
It should be noted that sometimes there is no clear boundary between different types of tropes, but there is a convergence of metaphor, personification, periphrasis and other types of tropes. For example: " shy spring" (F. Sologub) is at the same time an epithet, a metaphor, and personification. "And the golden autumn.../cries with leaves on the sand" (S. Yesenin) - metaphor, personification, periphrasis (since we are talking about leaf fall). "... Autumn is dark in the hem/Brought red leaves"(A. Akhmatova) – metaphor, personification, periphrase. "Kazbek, Mighty king of the Caucasus,/In a turban and brocade robe..." (M. Lermontov) - periphrase, metaphor, personification.
Comparison(lat. comparatio)- the simplest type of trope, which is a comparison of one object (phenomenon) with another according to some characteristic. At the same time, what is depicted receives greater specificity and brightness: “the bumblebees were look like short ribbons from St. George medals"(K. Paustovsky); “Chichikov saw in his [Plyushkin’s] hands a decanter that was covered in dust, like in a sweatshirt" (N. Gogol); appears from a new perspective: "The Caucasus was all in full view/And all like rumpled bed"(B. Pasternak); new shades of meaning are revealed in it, a subtext arises: “Like an ear of grain cut with a sickle, like a young lamb that senses deadly iron under its heart, He [Andriy] hung his head and fell on the grass without saying a single word" (N. Gogol). In the last example, comparisons express the motive of a victim doomed to death, and the motive of youth who has committed a grave offense.
Formally, a comparison consists of the following parts: 1) what is being compared is the subject of comparison, 2) what is being compared with is the object of comparison, 3) the characteristic by which it is being compared is the basis of comparison. "Eyes are blue like the sky"(A. Pushkin). Eyes– subject of comparison, like the sky– object of comparison, blue– basis for comparison.
The comparison sign can be omitted, but it is always implied: "Expletive master's,/ What a mosquito sting..."(N. Nekrasov). The main member of this triad is the object. This is actually a comparison, an image: “To my poems, like precious wines,/It’s time will come” (M. Tsvetaeva).
The following types of comparisons can be distinguished.
- 1. Comparative phrases in which there are unions as if, exactly, as if:"The garden is transparent, soft, definitely smoke" (I. Bunin); "The whole sky was clouded, like a black row"(N. Gogol); "Above me is a vault of air, /Like blue glass..."(A. Akhmatova).
- 2. Comparative clauses with the indicated conjunctions: “The doors suddenly began to dance, /as if at a hotel/a tooth doesn’t hit the mark”(V. Mayakovsky); "Natasha, like a shot hunted animal looks at the approaching dogs and hunters, looked first at one, then at the other" (L. Tolstoy).
- 3. Comparative phrases with words similar, similar:"Ivan Ivanovich's head looks like a radish with its tail down; head of Ivan Nikiforovich onto the radish with its tail up"(N. Gogol); "Shining eyes, Evgeniy / Stands like a menacing shadow"(A. Pushkin).
- 4. Non-union comparisons are expressed: 1) instrumental case of the noun: " golden frog the moon/Spread out on the still water" (S. Yesenin); "Wet little sparrow/ Lilac branch" (B. Pasternak); 2) comparative degree of an adjective together with a noun in the genitive case: "The blue plumage of the drake/ The dawn sparkled beyond the Kama" (B. Pasternak); "And needed more than our daily bread/ I have one word about him" (A. Akhmatova); 3) appendix: "Papa- crab snored quietly" (A. N. Tolstoy); "And the monkey boy / Sings through his sleep" (I. Bunin).
- 5. A special place is occupied by those comparisons based on the technique parallelism. These are, firstly, the so-called negative comparisons used in folklore and original works stylized as folk poetry. The first part in negative comparisons is the image with negation, and the second, affirmative, is the subject of comparison:
It’s not the wind that hums through the feather grass,
It's not the wedding train that's thundering, –
The relatives of Procles howled,
(N. Nekrasov)
This type of comparison is always perceived as folk-poetic and creates a certain folkloric flavor of the text.
Parallelism is also created by a comparison of a purely literary type - connecting, which is also called falling. The first part in such a comparison is a story about the subject, and the second, attached with words so, so- this is an image that should explain the subject itself, although sometimes it acquires an independent character.
Sleep flies from her bed;
Health, color and sweetness of life,
Smile, virgin peace,
Everything is gone, the sound is empty,
And dear Tanya’s youth fades:
This is how the shadow of the storm dresses the barely born day.
(A. Pushkin)
They mock you
They, O Motherland, reproach
You with your simplicity,
Poor looking black huts...
So son, calm and impudent,
Ashamed of his mother –
Tired, timid and sad
Among his city friends.
(I. Bunin)
From the above examples it is clear that comparisons can be detailed, widespread, representing an allegorical story. E. Baratynsky’s poems “A wonderful city will sometimes merge...” and “O thought! for you is the lot of a flower...” and M. Lermontov’s poem “The Beggar Woman” are built on this principle. Extended comparisons were widely used by Gogol: “...And young blood gushed out in a stream, like expensive wine, which was carried in a glass vessel from the cellar by careless servants, slipped right there at the entrance and broke the expensive brine: the wine all spilled onto the ground, and the owner who came running grabbed himself by the head, saving it for the best case in life, so that if God brings old age to meet with a friend of youth, then to remember with him a previous, different time, when a person had fun differently and better..." In this case, we are dealing with the implementation of comparison - it turns into a valuable picture in itself, the details of which do not correlate with the subject of comparison (the story of the owner and the shed blood).In ancient poetics, a common comparison, representing a certain complete image that achieved a large degree of independence, was designated by a special term - parabola. Thus, in the Iliad:
Like a poppy in a flower bed tilts its head to the side,
Lush, weighed down with fruit and large spring moisture, –
So he bowed his head to one side, weighed down by his helmet.
It is necessary to distinguish between common general linguistic, commonly used comparisons with erased imagery (flies like a bird, white like snow sleeping like dead etc.), and the author's individual ones, which are a visual and expressive means and are marked by freshness and unusualness of the image. The latter quality makes itself felt especially clearly in the poems of some modern poets, who compare objects that are outwardly incomparable. Their closeness is revealed only associatively, but at the same time additional meanings are revealed in the object of comparison.
On that day, all of you, from comb to toe,
Like a tragedian in the provinces plays Shakespeare's drama,
I carried it with me and knew it by heart,
I wandered around the city and rehearsed.
(B. Pasternak)
"The twelfth hour has fallen ,/Like the head of an executed man falling off the block" (V. Mayakovsky); "My cat, like a radio receiver/ He catches the world with his green eye" (A. Voznesensky).
However, the advantages of comparison as an artistic means lie not only in the surprise of the comparison, but also in the accuracy of the chosen image, revealing the deep essence of the subject:
Anchar, like a menacing sentry,
There is only one in the whole universe.
(A. Pushkin)
"The clerk's wife... brought with her all her children and, like a bird of prey looked askance at the plates and grabbed everything that came to hand" (A. Chekhov).
It is customary to talk about two main functions of comparisons in artistic speech – figurative and expressive. The pictorial function is realized in the descriptive part of the text (landscape, portrait, interior): “...Tall and rare... clouds, yellow-white, like late spring snow, flat and oblong, like lowered sails..."(I. Turgenev); "Like cornflowers in the rye, the eyes bloom in the face" (S. Yesenin); "...In this yellow closet, like a closet or chest..."(F. Dostoevsky). The expressive, or expressive, function is characteristic of evaluative and emotional comparisons, as well as unexpected, associative ones:
Life, like a shot bird
He wants to get up but can’t...
There is no flight, no scope;
Broken wings hang
And all of her, clinging to the dust,
Trembling from pain and powerlessness...
(F. Tyutchev)
"Your thought, dreaming on a softened brain, /Like an overweight lackey on a greasy couch..."(V. Mayakovsky).
Fine and expressive functions can be combined:
crimson cancer, like a knight in red armor,
Like Don Quixote powerless and mustachioed.
(E. Bagritsky)
"The eyes of that [Bormenthal] resembled two black muzzles aimed at Sharikov"(M. Bulgakov).
One of the most important comparison functions is the analyzing function. Comparison, as already noted, highlights, emphasizes some attribute of an object or the meaning of a phenomenon, is used to characterize the characters, and gives them an assessment. We find examples of such a comparison in M. Lermontov’s poem “Portrait”:
Like a curly boy frisky,
Dressed up, like a butterfly in summer,
Empty Word Meanings
Her lips are full of greetings.
You can't like her for long:
Like a chain She can't stand the habit.
She'll slip away like a snake.
It will flutter and fly away, like a bird.
Conceals the young brow
According to the will - both joy and sorrow.
In eyes - how bright it is in the sky,
It's dark in her soul like in the sea!
Chekhov gives a very accurate assessment of the heroine in the story “In the Ravine”: “... green, with a yellow breast [we are talking about a dress], with a smile, she [Aksinya] looked, like in the spring a viper looks out of the young rye at a passerby, stretched out and raising its head.”
An analyzing comparison conveys the mental state of the characters, their perception of a certain situation. This is how Pechorin sees the gorge where his duel with Grushnitsky is supposed to take place: “down there, it seemed dark and cold, like in a coffin; mossy teeth of rocks, thrown down by thunderstorms and time, were awaiting their prey" (M. Lermontov). Comparisons of this type are used by Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov. The awkwardness and embarrassment that Anna Sergeevna experiences (“The Lady with the Dog”) is conveyed using comparison: "and there was an impression of confusion, as if someone suddenly knocked on the door"(A. Chekhov).
A comparison, especially a widespread one, may include other tropes or, conversely, may itself be part of a metaphor, metonymy, or personification. Here is a comparison, the image of which is metaphorical:
I have now become more stingy in my desires,
My life? or did I dream about you?
As if I were a booming early spring
He rode on a pink horse.
(S. Yesenin)
The metaphor “spring resounding early” is associated here with youth, its dreams and hopes. The metaphorical epithet “pink” is also associated in the language with ideas about early youth ( pink childhood, pink dreams).
The object of comparison can be expressed by metonymy:
And he is killed - and taken by the grave,
Like that singer, unknown but sweet,
The prey of deaf jealousy...
(M. Lermontov)
The highlighted words are a paraphrase for Lensky.
Comparison can enhance personification, merging with it into a common complex image; "...And wind, like a boatman rowing.../Across the linden trees" (B. Pasternak); "...Cherry leaves, like birds with green wings, flew in and sat on bare branches" (M. Prishvin).
An expanded metaphor can include a comparison and also form a single image with it:
And just as fun and catchy,
Like those watermelons at the gate,
The earth is shaking in a string bag
Meridians and latitudes.
(A. Voznesensky)
Like a white stone in the depths of a well,
One memory remains with me...
(A. Akhmatova)
In some texts, comparisons can acquire a multi-valued generalized meaning and special depth, expressing ideas that are important to the author and, thus, turning into a symbol. In Lermontov’s poem “The Poet,” the first part contains a description of the dagger and its history (“It glitters like a golden toy on the wall –/Alas, inglorious and harmless!”); the second part begins with a rhetorical question that shapes the image of comparison and at the same time gives it a symbolic meaning (“In our age, pampered, haven’t you, poet, / Lost your purpose, / Having exchanged for gold the power that the world / Heard in silent reverence?” ). An extensive symbolic comparison is also the famous image of the Rus'-troika from Gogol: “Isn’t it true that you, Rus', are rushing along like a brisk, unstoppable troika?..”
In some cases, an associative comparison of various objects and phenomena appears in the text, but it is not formalized in the form of a comparison. For example, in the sentence: “She had a good, rich, strong voice, and while she sang, it seemed to me that I was eating a ripe, sweet, fragrant melon"(A. Chekhov). In Turgenev's story "The Singers", Jacob's singing evokes in the author a memory of a seagull on the seashore. In both cases, there is an associative convergence of objects (phenomena), but there is no formal comparison. Gogol uses a metaphor close to comparison: “And the dark line of swans flying north were suddenly illuminated by a silver-pink light and then it seemed that red scarves were flying across the sky."
The construction of a sentence in the form of a question and an answer is controversial, and the answer is given in the form of a definition or figurative interpretation of the subject. Some researchers consider this construction to be a comparison:
What is happiness? A short moment and cramped,
Oblivion, sleep or rest from worries...
However, since the comparison is present here in a hidden form, this turn can be considered as a transitional case between metaphor and comparison.
Metaphor(Greek metaphora- transfer) is a type of trope based on the transfer of the properties of one object to another on the basis of their similarity in some respect - in shape, color, value, function, etc. (forest tent, golden head, sleeping river, bear- about an awkward person).
There are commonly used metaphors (see previous examples) and individual-stylistic ones. The first ones are distinguished by somewhat erased imagery and automaticity of use. Using them in works of art, the authors strive to revive and actualize expressions that have already become stereotypical: “The vast vault of heaven has opened up, expanded even more immensely, it burns and breathes” (N. Gogol). The automated metaphor “the vault of heaven” comes to life, joining the metaphorical chain - “the immense vault”, “the vault has moved apart”, “the vault is burning and breathing”...
Individual stylistic metaphors are characterized by surprise, novelty and have a higher degree of expressiveness: “Life is a mouse race” (A. Pushkin); "The gift is in vain, gift random,/Life, why were you given to me?" (A. Pushkin); "And you could play a nocturne/On flute the drainpipes!"(V. Mayakovsky); "Heavy hoof of premonition hit Gritsatsueva in the heart" (I. Ilf and E. Petrov).
Metaphor has many varieties, transitional types that bring it closer to other tropes. For example, there is such a type of metaphor as a metaphorical epithet, which names not so much the real sign of an object, but rather a possible sign borrowed from another sphere: “Neva sovereign current", "sly dagger", "him yearning laziness" (A. Pushkin), "at the dawn foggy youth" (A. Koltsov), "longing road, railway"(A. Blok), " frog greenery of country carriages" (E. Bagritsky).
Metaphor is sometimes called a hidden or shortened comparison (Aristotle, Hegel). Unlike comparison, in which both terms of comparison are present and usually there are conjunctions ( How etc.), in metaphor, conjunctions are excluded, and metaphor itself is a special semantic structure, a new integrity that preserves both the direct meaning of the word and the figurative, figurative meaning associated with it. In metaphor there is the possibility of discovering new meanings. Metaphor is not reduced to the sum of the phenomena being compared; its meaning is multifaceted, “fluctuating” (Yu. Tynyanov): “In the heart lilies of the valley flared up strength"(S. Yesenin). The metaphorical meaning of the word "lilies of the valley" is based on the real characteristics of the flower - "delicate", "spring", "beautiful"; that is why the feeling that flares up in the heart is associated with this plant.
In some cases, the interpretation of metaphorical meaning is difficult, since the chain of associations is subjective and complex, and the image arises on the basis of a combination of distant concepts (“associative image”). The early poems of V. Mayakovsky, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, B. Pasternak, A. Voznesensky are saturated with similar metaphors.
Oh heaven, heaven, I will dream about you!
It can't be that you're completely blind,
And the day burned like a white page:
A little smoke and a little ash!
(O. Mandelstam)
Despite the significant differences between comparison and metaphor, the boundary between them is not always clearly defined. Some types of metaphor are easily converted into similes using an inserted conjunction. This is primarily a metaphor that controls the genitive case. It is classified as a transitional type of metaphor-comparison: “lantern rolls” (B. Pasternak), i.e. lanterns are like buns; “blade of gaze” (M. Sholokhov) – gaze, like a blade; “A trough of the Sea of Azov” (E. Bagritsky) – The Sea of Azov is like a trough.
A transitional type between metaphor and comparison is a nominal metaphor, used as a predicate: “Life is deception with enchanting melancholy"(S. Yesenin); "Your name - bird in hand,/ Your name - ice on the tongue"(M. Tsvetaeva).
Some metaphors grow from comparisons, developing and deepening them. For example, I. Bunin’s poem “Falling Leaves” begins with a detailed comparison: “Forest, looks like a painted tower..." Subsequently, on the basis of this comparison, a central metaphorical image grows: “And autumn, a quiet widow, / Today entered her mansion.”
A metaphorical image can cover a whole sentence or several sentences, forming a chain of metaphors of general semantics: “There is a fire of red rowan burning in the garden, / But it cannot warm anyone” (S. Yesenin). Rowan bonfire – the fire is burning – the fire doesn't warm...– such a metaphor is called expanded or widespread.
“Virgin thickets of bird cherry and sweet cherry timidly stretched out their roots in the spring cold and occasionally babble with their leaves, as if angry and indignant, when the beautiful anemone - the night wind, creeping up instantly, kisses them” (N. Gogol). In this example, two metaphorical series make up a single complex image: 1) virgin thickets - the thickets have stretched out roots - the thickets are babbling, fearfully reaching out, angry and indignant; 2) beautiful anemone - wind; the wind creeps up and kisses them.
An expanded metaphor can form an entire work. Such, for example, are the poems by E. Baratynsky “The Road of Life” and A. Pushkin “The Cart of Life”. These are quite complex constructions in which developed metaphors essentially turn into allegories (alegories). Thus, Baratynsky’s picture of driving along the postal road is transformed into an allegory: life is a road along which a person loses his “golden dreams” (another allegory with the meaning “dreams, hobbies, hopes of youth”).
Metaphors are often used in the titles of works of art. In this case, they acquire a high degree of generalization, expressing the main idea of the work: “Smoke”, “Noble Nest”, “Thunderstorm”, “Dead Souls”, “Cliff”, “Iron Stream” - all these are essentially symbolic metaphors.
The metaphor takes on character symbol with the condensation of artistic generalization, provided that it contains both specific and generalized characterizing meanings, and the latter predominates. The symbol is characterized by “fuzzy”, unclear meanings that it contains and which are largely determined by historical conditions and the social position of the author. A traditional poetic symbol-metaphor is a storm. In Nekrasov and Gorky, the storm becomes a symbol of the revolution: “A storm would strike or something...” (N. Nekrasov); "Let the storm blow harder!" (M. Gorky).
Often the author makes a conscious effort to identify the symbolic meaning of what is depicted. In I. Turgenev’s novel “Smoke,” the hero watches clouds of smoke rushing past the windows of the train in which he is traveling, and “everything suddenly seemed like smoke to him, everything, his own life, Russian life - everything human, especially everything Russian. Everything is smoke and steam, he thought; everything seems to be constantly changing, new images are everywhere, phenomena run after phenomena, but in essence everything is the same and the same...".
A type of metaphor is metaphor-periphrase, a descriptive expression in which, instead of one word, a phrase, a sentence, or even several sentences is used: “But what was his true genius, / What he knew more firmly than all sciences ...<...>Was the spider of tender passion/Which Nazon sang..."(A. Pushkin). This trope is called a riddle metaphor, the meaning of which follows from the context or extra-textual information (cultural context): “She defeated the living horses steel cavalry" (S. Yesenin) - (i.e. tractor); "Autumn - chestnut mare- scratching his mane..." (S. Yesenin); "The camel is standing, Assargadon desert" (N. Zabolotsky). In the last two examples, the word in its literal meaning (the solution) precedes the periphrasis.
A modification of a metaphor can also be metaphorical personification, or personification(lat. persona– mask, face and facio- I do), - transferring the properties of living beings to inanimate objects and phenomena. Natural phenomena are especially often personified: “It’s hard to say why, but it really helped to write the consciousness that behind the wall the old village garden flies all night long. I thought of it as a living creature. He was silent and patiently waited for the time when I "I'll go late in the evening to the well for water for the kettle. Maybe it was easier for him to endure this endless night when he heard the clanking of a bucket and the steps of a man" (K. Paustovsky).
The road thought about the red evening,
Rowan bushes are more misty than the depths.
Hut-old woman jaw threshold
Chews the fragrant crumb of silence.
(S. Yesenin)
In A. Chekhov's story "The Steppe" the image of the steppe is based on numerous personifications of natural phenomena that saturate the entire text. A lonely poplar, “tanned” hills, wind and rain, birds - everything is likened to living beings, everything thinks and feels... This is how a metaphorical symbol is born, associated with the artist’s thoughts about happiness, about the homeland, about time, about the meaning of life: “And in the triumph of beauty, in an excess of happiness, you feel tension and melancholy, as if the steppe realizes that it is lonely, that its wealth and inspiration are perishing as a gift to the world, unsung by anyone and unnecessary to anyone, and through the joyful hum you hear its sad, hopeless call: the singer ! singer!"
Sometimes personification is expressed through anthropomorphization, depiction of inanimate phenomena, in particular abstract concepts, by endowing them with human properties.
AND, we are tormented by an ominous thought,
Full of black dreams
And he didn’t count his enemies.
With a sad look He looked around
The tribe of their mountains,
He pulled his hat down over his eyebrows,
And forever quieted down.
(M. Lermontov)
Tear-stained autumn, like a widow
In black clothes, all hearts are clouded,
Going through my husband's words,
She won't stop crying.
(A. Akhmatova)
So, there are the following types of metaphor: 1) metaphors themselves: “Not a person - snake!" (A. Griboedov), 2) metaphor-epithet - “shine unquenched eyes"(A. Akhmatova), 3) metaphor-comparison – "Centuries-lanterns, oh how many of you are in the darkness" (V. Bryusov), 4) metaphor-periphrase - "That was desert eternal guest- a mighty leopard" (M. Lermontov), 5) metaphor-personification - "About the red evening thought about the road"(S. Yesenin), 6) metaphor-symbol – “mortal thoughts water cannon" (F. Tyutchev), 7) metaphor-allegory - “the road of life” (E. Baratynsky).
A metaphorical expression can be used in a literary text and in the literal sense - in its literal unfolding. This is the so-called implementation of a metaphor, a technique that sometimes creates a comic effect: “There’s a moon in the sky so young that it would be risky to let her out without companions"(V. Mayakovsky). In Mayakovsky’s poem “A Cloud in Pants,” the metaphor “fire of the heart” is realized in this way: “On a face that is burning from the crack of the lips, a charred kiss has grown to rush”; “The choir is engaged at the church of the heart”; “Burnt figures of words and numbers from the skull, like children from a burning building.”
Another important type of tropes is metonymy(Greek meta- turn, entanglement– name, title). Metonymy is a trope based on association by contiguity. Instead of the name of one object, the name of another is used, connected with the first by spatial, temporal or logical contiguity: I ate three plates(containing instead of containing), in the closet crystal And silver(material and product made from it), read Pushkin(author's name instead of his work), I love " Anna Karenina"(work of art and its title), etc.
Metonymy is widely used in colloquial speech, as can be seen from the above examples of general linguistic metonymy with erased imagery. In literary texts, such metonymies are used both in the speech of characters and in the author’s speech and serve as a means of stylizing conversational manner. Thus, in “Eugene Onegin” there are many cases of the use of metonymic combinations with stylistic colloquial coloring, which are not particularly expressive: “To trim Phaedra, Cleopatra, Moina call..." (i.e. actresses playing these roles); "But also Didlo I'm tired of" (ballets staged by Didelot); " Amber And bronze on the table" (products made of amber and bronze); " Parterre And armchairs– everything is boiling" (audience in the stalls); " Martin Zadeka became later/Tanya's favorite" (a fortune-telling book, the compiler of which was the mythical Martyn Zadeka); "So that every morning Take/ In debt to drain three bottles" (restaurant owned by Beri).
But in the same novel, the poet transforms the commonly used metonymy into a figurative one:
Napoleon waited in vain
Moscow kneeling
With the keys of the old Kremlin.
No, my Moscow did not go to him with a guilty head.
Not a holiday, not a receiving gift,
She was preparing a fire
To the impatient hero.
Moscow here is not only a metonymic image (the population of the capital), but also a personification (kneeling, with a guilty head).
Literary speech includes metonymic periphrases like “on on the banks of the Neva"(In Petersburg), "under the sky of Schiller and Goethe"(in Germany), "to the singer Gulnara imitating" (Byron), "he is holy for Apollo's grandchildren"(poets). These are traditional metonymic periphrases, characteristic of the poetry of the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries.
In lyrical works, metonymies, including metonymic periphrases, serve as a means of emotionally condensing poetic speech and focusing attention on the mental states of the characters. For example, Pushkin's poem "For the shores of the distant fatherland..." is woven from metonymic periphrases. A group of these tropes allegorically denotes Italy (the shores of a distant homeland, a different land, under an eternally blue sky, in the shade of olive trees), Russia (a foreign land, from the land of gloomy exile), there are also periphrases with the meaning “you died” (You fell asleep in your last sleep ./Your beauty, your suffering.../Disappeared in the coffin urn), etc.
Metonymy has the ability to create a comic effect with a non-standard combination of words, which makes it possible to perceive a separate detail as personification: "Court and Life" has arrived on the other hand and said touchily..." (I. Ilf and E. Petrov). Here "Court and Life" is an employee of the newspaper department with this name. "Suddenly, as if breaking loose, both halls danced, and behind them the veranda danced too"(M. Bulgakov). Metonymy can also become the basis for a pun (word game): “With this history happened story" (N. Gogol). Two meanings of the word (1 – event, 2 – story about it) are placed in metonymic relations.
In M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” the name of the writer’s restaurant, located in the house where Griboyedov’s aunt supposedly lived, is played out in a pun. In common parlance, the restaurant was called "At Griboedov's", hence the remark of the poet Bezrodny: "I'll search Griboyedov for now."
Metonymy is mainly expressed using nouns, but metonymies can also be found among adjectives: metonymies of a feature. In Bulgakov, “a man in a lilac coat” (literal meaning) turns into a “lilac client”, “a lilac foreigner”; a character in checkered trousers is a “checkered citizen”, a “checkered specialist”, simply a “checkered person”.
But, apparently, with such a non-normative combination of words, semantic transformations arise, and we are dealing with a combination of the tropes of metaphor and metonymy. Pushkin’s “crafty dagger” is deceptive, insidious, dangerous, unfaithful - the properties of both a person and an object. Thus, “the evil one” is a metaphor (metaphorical epithet) and metonymy.
A type of metonymy is synecdoche (Greek. synexdoche– correlation). The essence of synecdoche is that an object as a whole is designated through its part, some detail that becomes a “representative” of these objects: herd of twenty heads, lists of invited persons etc. Synecdoche is widespread in colloquial speech. Words naming parts of the human body (arm, leg, head, face, etc.), parts of clothing (fur coat, hat, boots), tools (feather, shovel) - in the meaning of “man”, using the singular instead of the plural , replacement of a generic concept with a specific one and vice versa - all this is replicated in everyday speech and is endowed with moderate expressiveness. Examples of such synecdoches in the language of fiction primarily serve as a means of creating a conversational style both in the speech of characters and in the author’s speech: " Beard! Why are you still silent?”; “On one sofa there lies a lieutenant in a fur hat and sleeps... “Get up!” - the doctor wakes you up papahu"(A. Chekhov); "He was famous feather in the province" (I. Goncharov); "The driver threw out the door, / Brakes: "Sit down, infantry,/Cheeks I would rub it with snow" (A. Tvardovsky).
Sometimes synecdoche, naming a character by the details of his clothing, becomes a means of his social characterization: “Salop says smell, smell the cloak..."(V. Mayakovsky). Chuika is the outer clothing of merchants and townspeople for men, and the salop is women's clothing. "And at the door pea coats, overcoats, sheepskin coats"(sailors, soldiers, peasants). In the novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov "The Golden Calf" the synecdoche "pique vests" creates an ironic image of "the wreckage of the pre-war commercial Chernomorsk." In some contexts, the possibility arises of interpreting the phrase as personification, which enhances expressiveness and gives the image a touch of comedy: “The pique vests gathered closer and stretched out their chicken necks”; “a herd of pique vests.”
Metonymy and synecdoche, rising to generalization, can become a metonymic symbol that expresses a multi-valued author's idea. In M. Tsvetaeva’s poem “Night Swallows of Intrigue...” the word cloak at first it is used simply to designate clothing, i.e. in the literal sense, and then grows into a symbolic metonymic image, which, in turn, acts as personification (“A cloak bending the knee, / A cloak assuring: - dark!”).
Night Swallows of Intrigue –
Cloaks! – Winged Heroes
High society adventures.
A cloak showing a hole
Player's cloak and rogues,
Cloak - Rogue, cloak - Cupid.
A cloak as playful as a fleece
Cloak kneeling
A cloak that assures: – dark!
Watch horns. – The roar of the Seine –
Casanova's cloak, Lauzen's cloak,
Antoinette's dominoes.
The traditional metonymic symbol is the image of the Muse. In N. Nekrasov's poem "Yesterday, at six o'clock..." the poetic cliche receives a new meaning: Muse is the sister of a young peasant woman who is being beaten with a whip. This is already a real, concrete and at the same time metonymic image - a symbol of the people. Thus, in the subtext, the idea of a connection between Nekrasov’s poetry and the people arises, which is achieved by juxtaposing two metonymic images.
Synecdoche should not be confused with detail. The detail is not the name of the whole, that is, it is not used in a figurative sense. Thus, the button that came off Makar Devushkin’s uniform and rolled to the feet of “his excellency” (“Poor People” by F. Dostoevsky) is a very important, symbolic detail, but this is not a synecdoche: “Everything is lost! All reputation is lost, all the man is missing!"
Epithet(Greek epitheton- letters, application). Despite the fact that the term “epithet” is one of the oldest and most commonly used stylistic terms, at present there is no unity in its definition. There is a narrow and broad interpretation of the epithet. In the narrow sense of the word, an epithet is a tropical means, that is, epithets include metaphorical and metonymic definitions and circumstances.
A metaphorical epithet does not name a real feature, but one transferred from another object on the basis of some similarity - " thoughtful nights", "flame greedy", "monotonous life noise" (A. Pushkin), " solemnly And regal it was night" (I. Turgenev), "the peals thundered young"(F. Tyutchev).
A metonymic epithet denotes a feature transferred from another object on the basis of contiguity - "bold lorgnette" (M. Lermontov), "lonely dawn", " snow noise" (S. Yesenin).
A broader understanding of the epithet offers recognition of the existence of both tropical and non-tropical epithets. The latter include definitions and circumstances (adverbs that answer the question “how?”), which contain emotional, evaluative, expressive shades that express the subjective attitude of the author or character to a certain person or object. From Baratynsky:
Feigned don't demand tenderness from me,
I will not hide the coldness of my heart sad.
You're right, it's not there anymore beautiful fire
My original love.
The accuracy and emotional intensity of Pushkin’s epithets is remarkable:
My cooling hands
They tried to keep you...
Not cold, but rather cold... The epithet here emphasizes the futility of trying to keep your beloved.
From Lermontov:
A hot tear like a flame,
Inhuman tear!
Hot tear - the metaphorical epithet is not very expressive. Its expression is enhanced by the comparison “like a flame,” but special expressiveness is achieved with the help of an emotional-evaluative epithet - “an inhuman tear.”
The evaluation expressed by an epithet can be both positive and negative. “Sweet, kind, old, gentle./ Don’t be friends with sad thoughts,” Yesenin’s address to his mother determines the tone of the epithet. “The hands were dirty, fat, red, With black nails" (F. Dostoevsky) is an example of epithets with a negative meaning.
Non-tropical epithets also include figurative epithets, with the help of which the real physical properties of the material world are recorded: color, smell, taste, etc.: “Around noon, a lot of people usually appear steep highs clouds, golden-gray, with delicate white edges..." (I. Turgenev); "This fog was variously colored. There were things in it pink, That gold, That blue And lilac, That purple And bronze, wide and blurry spots" (K. Paustovsky); "And the nights were dark, warm, with purple clouds, calm, calm. Sleepily ran and flowed babble sleepy poplars. Zarnitsa carefully flashed over dark Trosha forest - and warm, dry it smelled of oak" (I. Bunin). In the last example, the dim, at first glance erased epithets "dark", "warm" stand in a context that actualizes their figurative meaning through the repetition of the emotional "calm", the use of the metaphorical definition of "sleepy", “sleepy”, the order of words in a sentence, intonation, etc. In other words, the degree of figurativeness of the epithet, its depth depend not only on the word itself, but also on the words adjacent to it in the context and other linguistic means.
And yet, poets are driven by the desire to find bright and unusual epithets. Most often, they resort to a non-standard, non-normative compatibility of the epithet with a noun. Thus, color adjectives refer to nouns denoting color, sound, smell, resulting in a kind of synthesis of sensations. This kind of epithets is called synaesthetic:“azure voice” (F. Sologub), “purple smell of sage” (M. Voloshin), “green rustling” (A. Akhmatova). As a rule, synaesthetic epithets belong to the category of metonymic.
The phrases in B. Pasternak’s poem “Winter Morning” are unexpected:
Cotton, frozen And flannelette, fortkovaya
The same horror of birches nestless
Garusnaya the night turns into light over tea,
Winter dazed air.
Used here occasional, i.e., epithets created for this case - “fortkovaya”, “without nest”; the meaning of individual words is not precisely defined, but the general impression is given to the reader. And behind all these details is the mood of the author himself, his perception of the picture of a winter morning. Occasional epithets are often found in Mayakovsky (“the street is writhing tongueless","The royal one will lie in about fried sand""heart isokhanny","evening... gloomy, December").
Unusual epithets also arise with the help of oxymoronic phrases, when incompatible, even contradictory properties are attributed to the same object at the same time: “living dead” (E. Baratynsky), “to taste the sweetest pain” (A. Blok), “cheerful sadness” (I . Northerner), “icy fire of wine” (V. Bryusov).
The epithet is, in all likelihood, the earliest method of distinguishing poetic speech from the level of everyday speech. The antiquity of this technique is evidenced by folklore epithets, which are also called permanent. IN Russian folk art constantly features: dark forest, blue sea, clean field, high tower, oak table, sharp saber, good fellow, beautiful maiden etc.
Various literary movements also formed their own range of epithets. For sentimentalists, for example, the following phrases are indicative: “a gentle, meek nightingale”, “drinks sweet nectar”, “have fun with sweet hope”, “mourn the poor mortals’ lot”, “in the rural huts of the humble”, “sensitive, kind old woman”, “ dear, dear Erasmus" (N. Karamzin). Epithets typical of romantic poetry: “to all ardent hearts” (E. Baratynsky), “and fatal passions everywhere”, “sweet dreams”, “terrible visions” (A. Pushkin), “dressed in the darkness of the grave”, “with the joy of mystery ", "witness of those magical days" (M. Lermontov).
An epithet in a text is usually closely connected with other tropes - metaphors, personifications, metonymies, comparisons, as a result of which a complex artistic image is created:
Where the cabbage beds are
Sunrise waters with red water...
(S. Yesenin)
It would be wrong to single out the epithet “red” here, since it is part of the metaphor “red water” - the light of the rising sun. To remove the epithet here means to destroy the metaphor.
And the night is like a harlot
She looked shamelessly
On dark faces, in sore eyes.
The chain of tropes (the night looked - like a harlot - shamelessly), where the epithet "shamelessly" is connected with the comparison "like a harlot", thus constitutes a single image (metaphor - personification - comparison - epithet).
The epithet, receiving a generalized meaning, acquiring additional meanings and shades, turns into a symbol. Usually the symbolic meaning is through an epithet, that is, repeated throughout the entire work, cycle of poems, sometimes even the poet’s entire work. In L. Andreev's story "Red Laughter" the word "red" is the supporting symbolic image. "Yes, they sang - everything was around red with blood. The sky itself seemed red, and one might think that some kind of catastrophe had occurred throughout the universe, some strange change and disappearance of colors: blue and green and other familiar and quiet colors disappeared, and the sun caught fire red Bengali fire. – "Red"laughter," I said. "Something huge red, bloody stood above me and laughed toothlessly." "From the very wall of the house to the cornice there began a smooth fiery red sky.<...>And below him lay the same flat dark red field, and it was covered with corpses." "Outside the window, in the crimson and moving light, stood red laugh." Here the image of “red laughter” symbolizes the horror of war, its bloody, terrible and senseless power.
The context of S. Yesenin’s entire work creates a special feeling of blue-blue tones that predominate in the poet’s palette, and this, in turn, gives rise to emotional elation, an attractive “halo” of an object or phenomenon.
In the evening blue, moonlit evening
I was once handsome and young.
The heart has grown cold and the eyes have faded...
Blue happiness! Moonlit nights.
Periphrase(paraphrase) (Greek) periphrasis- retelling, roundabout turn) - replacing a word with an allegorical descriptive expression. From Pushkin: “The spring of my days has flown by”; “spring of days” – youth; “My noon has come”—maturity has come.
In fiction, periphrasis is most often a trope - metonymy or metaphor. “All flags will visit us” (A. Pushkin) – metonymic periphrasis (ships of all nations will arrive in St. Petersburg); "Bee from wax cells/flies for field tribute"(A. Pushkin) - here there are two metaphorical periphrases at once.
Periphrases were especially widely used in the literature of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The ornateness of allegorical expressions was even considered an indispensable feature of poetic language in the era of classicism, sentimentalism and romanticism. Early Pushkin often uses periphrases, but gradually the poet abandons them. In realistic literature, periphrases are preserved, but they are no longer as pretentious and far-fetched as in the 18th century. Here is a periphrasis with the meaning “painting” from M. Lomonosov: “The art for which Apelles was glorified, / And with which Rome has now raised its head...” And here are traditional romantic periphrases with the meaning “death” from E. Baratynsky:
Youth was given to us for a time;
Until the fateful housewarming
Life is not bad for having fun.
Still full, my dear friend,
Before us is the cup of sweet life;
But death, perhaps, this very hour
He will overturn her with mockery, -
And instantly the blood in the heart will cool,
And the underground house will hide us!
“The full cup of life” symbolizes youth, the fullness of being; “underground house” – grave, coffin; "fatal housewarming" - death.
Periphrases give the poet the opportunity to vary the expression of one thought, one theme. Thus, romantic poets are finding more and more new expressions for the traditional theme of death in their work. From Pushkin: “You fell asleep in your last sleep”; “For your poet you are already dressed in the twilight of the grave, / And for you your friend has faded away”; “Your beauty, your suffering/Disappeared in the coffin urn...”; “The storm blew, the beautiful color/Faded at dawn,/The fire on the altar went out!..”
Paraphrases are often used as applications or addresses. In this case, they emphasize some important properties of a person or object. "The satyrs are a brave ruler,/ Fonvizin shone, friend of freedom..." (A. Pushkin); "The Poet died!– slave of honor..." (M. Lermontov); "Blue Homeland of Firdusi ,/ G Gee You can’t, having lost your memory,/Forget about the affectionate Urus..." (S. Yesenin).
Allegory(Greek allegory- allegory) - a trope in which an abstract thought is expressed in an objective image. The allegory has two plans - along with concrete imagery, the allegory also contains a semantic plan, which is the main one. The semantic plan is either openly indicated in an allegorical text, as, for example, in a fable morality, or requires special commentary. Thus, I. Krylov’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb” is preceded by a moral that reveals the meaning of the subsequent narrative: “The strong are always to blame for the powerless.” The main idea of the fable is presented here in an extremely open form. The lines from Lomonosov’s ode:
And behold, Minerva strikes
To the top of Rifeyski with a copy...
require clarification. Minerva is in ancient mythology the goddess of wisdom, which in this case means science, with whose help the treasures (minerals) of the Ural Mountains become available.
Allegory was widely used in medieval literature, during the Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism. Abstract concepts - Truth, Virtue, Wisdom, Conscience, etc. - act as characters in poetry and prose. Often mythological characters were also filled with allegorical content. Sumarokov characterized the epic style of his time as follows:
Minerva is wisdom in him, Diana is purity,
Love is Cupid, Venus is beauty.
Almost any event could be depicted as the action of mythological figures. In Lomonosov’s ode “On the day of the accession to the throne of Empress Elisaveta Petrovna, 1747,” one of the key images is “silence” (peace). She becomes an allegorical figure of a woman spreading around her abundance - a consequence of peace. Elizabeth, presented in the ode as a defender of peace, “kissed the silence.”
In fables and parables, an allegorical sound is achieved with the help of images of animals, to which certain moral qualities are assigned: the fox is cunning, the donkey is stupid, the wolf is angry and bloodthirsty, etc.
For all its semantic transparency, an allegory is sometimes complicated by additional semantic and artistic nuances, especially when it is personified, that is, it coincides with personification. An example of such a complicated allegory is F. Tyutchev’s poem “Madness”:
There in cheerful carefree
Pathetic madness lives on.
It is looking for something in the clouds with glass eyes.
<...>
He listens to something with greedy ears
With contentment secret on the brow.
And he thinks he hears the boiling strings,
What does the current of underground water hear,
And their lullaby singing,
And a noisy exodus from the earth!..
The meaning of this allegory is that “mad” people are able to sense the secret life of nature, inaccessible to an ordinary person.
In the 19th century, allegories gradually fell out of use and were found only in a few writers. Thus, in the fairy tales of M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, allegory is combined with fantasy and hyperbole. His animal images satirically embody various social types: “The Wise Minnow”, “The Patron Eagle”, “The Sane Hare”, “The Bear in the Voivodeship”. The writer often accompanies allegories with hints of their hidden meaning. For example, the idea of the fairy tale “The Eagle Patron” is expressed in the conclusion: “eagles are harmful to enlightenment” - a kind of moral, as in a fable or fairy tale.
An allegory is close to a symbol. These tropes are often mixed. The difference between them is that an allegory has one meaning, while a symbol is multi-valued, and its meanings cannot always be clearly defined.
Symbol(Greek symbolon- sign, identification mark). Every symbol is an image, and every image is, at least to some extent, a symbol, as S. Averintsev believes. A symbol is, first of all, a generalized image that includes many associative features. The symbol is polysemantic and cannot be reduced to an unambiguous logical definition. When perceiving a symbol, it is necessary to do mental work, the purpose of which is to decipher the structure of complex symbols. In Dante's Divine Comedy, specific images are filled with symbolic meaning. Thus, Beatrice is a symbol of pure femininity, Mount Purgatory is a symbol of spiritual ascent, but these are symbols that, in turn, require interpretation.
In some cases, the author himself discovers the meaning of what is depicted. For example, in F. Tyutchev’s poem “Look, how in the expanse of the river...” a specific image is initially given: a stream with ice floes floating along it, and only a few words hint at the allegorical general meaning of the work: all the ice floes “will merge with the fatal abyss,” all are directed "into the all-encompassing sea." And in the last stanza the symbolic meaning of the images is revealed: the flow is life, time as such, ice floes are analogues of the fate of a particular person.
Oh, a generalization of our thoughts,
You, human self!
Isn't this your meaning?
Isn't this your destiny?
Of course, when decoding symbols (remember that a symbol is not limited to one meaning), their meaning inevitably becomes impoverished.
In principle, every element of an artistic system can be a symbol: tropes, an artistic detail, and even the hero of a work of art. The acquisition of symbolic meaning is facilitated by a number of certain conditions: 1) repetition and stability of the image, which makes it the so-called “cross-cutting image”, 2) the significance of the image in revealing the idea of the work or in the writer’s creative system as a whole, 3) the image’s belonging to a cultural or literary context (traditional ancient or biblical symbols).
One of the most characteristic motifs of Lermontov’s work is the motif of loneliness, embodied in a number of symbolic images. This is a pine tree on a bare top ("In the Wild North..."), a prisoner in a dungeon ("Prisoner", "Neighbor", "Captive Knight"), a leaf torn off by a storm ("Leaf"), a lonely ship ("Sail" ) etc.
An important symbolic detail in B. Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago" is the image of a candle burning in the room on Christmas evening, on the eve of Lara's dramatic shot at Komarovsky. In the subconscious of Yuri Zhivago, the image of Lara remains associated with the candle (“And his destiny in his life began”). No wonder the image of a candle appears in a poem dedicated to Lara:
Chalk, chalk all over the earth
To all limits.
The candle was burning on the table.
The candle was burning.
To the illuminated ceiling
The shadows were falling
Crossing of arms, crossing of legs,
Crossing fates.
The symbolic meaning of the detail is not revealed by the author directly; it is present in the subtext: a candle is the light of love, purpose.
In the art of the romantics, a symbolic landscape is widely represented, expressing the incomprehensible of reason. Individual elements of nature - sea, forest, sky, mountains - appear as symbols in a romantic landscape. But even in the literature of the 20th century, in which ideas about the interaction between man and nature become more complex, the landscape in the works of some artists retains philosophical symbolic richness. A clear example of this is the prose of I. Bunin. For him, the sea personifies world life - pristine, pre-temporal, eternal. “Behind the gates, in an endless dark abyss, the sea roared all night long - prematurely, drowsily, with an incomprehensible, threatening grandeur. I sometimes went out under the gates: the edge of the earth and pitch darkness, a strong blow of odorous fog and the cold of the waves, the noise either subsides or grows , rises like the noise of a wild forest... The abyss and the night, something blind and restless, somehow living in the womb and heavily, hostile and senseless..."
The term "symbol" is used in different meanings and in different fields of activity. It is used by logic, mathematics, philosophy, religion, semantics, semiotics, art and poetry. Common to all meanings is the property of a symbol “to imply something more, to hint at some kind of understatement.” The symbol “is always determined by the illumination of the general species in the particular or the universal in the individual, in other words, by the illumination (“light”) of eternity – in the moment.”
In literature, the symbol is the central concept of the movement that arose at the end of the 19th century and is known as "symbolism", but there it has a special meaning, expressing ideas that are beyond sensory perception.
There are individual and traditional symbols. The traditional one contains well-known associations and is used as a ready-made image (the lyre is a symbol of poetry in general, a bowl, cup, vial are symbols of life, etc.). The sources of traditional symbolism are mythology, in particular biblical and ancient, literary tradition, and philosophical concepts. Individual symbolism is revealed when getting acquainted with the artist’s entire work. A traditional symbol can be filled with new meanings, transformed, and become individual. The traditional symbol of loneliness - the desert - is often used by Lermontov, but in different poems of the poet the meaning of this word expands, a general, complex meaning of the symbol is formed. "For the heat of the soul, wasted in the desert...". Here the desert is a secular society. “In the crowd of people and among deserted deserts/In him, the quiet flame of feeling has not gone out...” The desert is a Siberian penal servitude, a land of exile; “The night is quiet; the desert listens to God, / And star speaks to star.” The desert is an image of a deserted night Earth, directed towards the heavens, towards God, a cosmic view of the Earth.
The symbolism of each great poet gives an idea of the poetic model of the world that he creates in his work.
Emblem(Greek emblem- insert, convex decoration) - an allegory in which an abstract concept is compared with concrete objects, the spiritual is equated with the material. However, the concreteness of the emblem is illusory. This is not real, but imaginary reality. Thus, the image of a heart pierced by an arrow is, at first glance, completely concrete, but the meaning of this image - love - is abstract.
Historically, the emblem arose as an explanatory inscription under the image of individual objects in mythological, biblical and historical scenes in artistic and literary collections. Emblems were widely used in the Middle Ages, in the aesthetics of Baroque, classicism and romanticism, but already in the second quarter of the 19th century, the use of emblems in literature sharply declined.
The emblem has a certain resemblance to an allegory: both are allegorical tropes. The sources of both are ancient and biblical myths, legends and heraldry (composition, interpretation and study of coats of arms). But, as A. Potebnya noted in “Lectures on the Theory of Literature,” allegory is plot-driven and dynamic, while the emblem is static.
In the poetry of the 18th century, the emblem dominated, forming complex allegorical images that required certain preparation for their understanding. For example, glorifying Elizabeth’s peace-loving policy, Lomonosov resorts to the following emblems:
AND sword is yours, laurels entwined,
Not naked, stopped the war.
The sword is the emblem of war, the laurels are the emblem of glory. The sword entwined with laurels is a famous Russian weapon, the mere presence of which is enough not to open hostilities.
V. Trediakovsky has a similar image: "Sword her, olive entwined..." The olive tree is also an emblem of peace, so the phrase means: peace reigns.
The names of animals and objects depicted on coats of arms and flags became emblems of states: for Russia - the eagle, for Turkey - the moon. That is why G. Derzhavin, wanting to say that Russia defeated Turkey, writes: "...eagle/Over the ancient kingdom of Mithridates/Flies and darkens moon."
The attributes of various mythological figures are emblematic: Cupid's bow, arrows and torch, associated with the image of love; a lyre, a lantern, a wreath of flowers, a wreath of laurels - emblems of poetry and poetic glory. Lensky’s drawings in Olga’s album are traditional emblem stamps that are designed to convey the feelings of the young poet:
Then they paint rural views,
Tombstone, temple of Cypris...
The reader of the 1820s easily perceived the meaning of such drawings: Lensky speaks of his “love to the grave” (Kypris is the goddess of love). “Or a dove on the lyre” - poetry serves love. Christian emblems were also easy to decipher - a cross, a lamp, a candle, etc.
The 18th-century Odic tradition of using geographical emblems continued into the next century. Pushkin and Lermontov have numerous names associated with the Caucasus and bringing a special exoticism to Russian poetry: “Aragva is making noise before me...”, “The pointed Beshtu stands / And the green Mashuk...” (A. Pushkin); “In the deep gorge of Daryal, / Where the Terek rummages in the darkness...” (M. Lermontov).
In the 20th century, in Soviet poetry, new emblematic images appeared, brought to life by official ideology - the hammer and sickle, October, the Kremlin, May:
Flag, overflowing with fire
Blooming like the dawn
And thin gold on it
Three virtues burn:
That hammer free labor,
Serpa cast bend,
Five pointed star
With a gold border.
(N. Tikhonov)
New emblems are compared with old ones in S. Yesenin’s poem “Russovetskaya”:
I'll give my whole soul October And Mayu,
But only lira I won’t give it to my dear.
Hyperbola(Greek hyperbole– exaggeration) is a technique based on exaggerating the properties of an object. "They told you a thousand times!" - in colloquial speech. Hyperbole is also used in artistic speech: “The entire surface of the earth seemed like a green-golden ocean, over which millions of different colors splashed” (N. Gogol).
Hyperbole is one of the most important artistic means of folklore. In the heroic epic, the description of the appearance of the characters, their strength, feasts, etc. is presented with extreme exaggeration in order to create the image of a hero. This is how the battle of Dobrynya and his comrade with the Tatars is depicted:
And they began to beat the great strongman.
And where they go, the street will fall,
They will turn around, and the alleys will fall.
They fought here for days
Don't give up and don't drink beer,
Yes, they beat the great strongwoman.
Hyperbole was also a necessary component of the ode in the poetry of classicism:
Oh! if only all Russians now
A burning thought has opened to you,
It would be a gloomy night from these pleasures
Changed to an eternal day.
(M. Lomonosov)
Sentimentalists created their own, now traditional, hyperboles associated with the manifestation of feelings:
With a smile on your lips, dry the rivers of tears,
Flowing from eyes sadly burdened!
(N. Karamzin)
The poetics of romanticism is characterized by a high style of hyperbole: “The wonderful air is cool and sultry, and full of bliss, and moves an ocean of fragrances,” “the majestic thunder of the Ukrainian nightingale pours down” (N. Gogol). Danko’s heart “blazed like the sun, and brighter than the sun” (M. Gorky).
Hyperbole can also create a comic intonation, which is typical, for example, of Gogol’s style: “a mouth the size of the arch of the General Staff building”; "harem pants as wide as the Black Sea"; “Ivan Nikiforovich, on the contrary, has trousers with such wide folds that if they were inflated, the entire yard with barns and buildings could be placed in them.”
Most often, hyperbole is a trope - a metaphor or comparison, sometimes an epithet: “And this little one, like leviathan ,/ Sailing on the sea sunsets..." (E. Bagritsky); "Oh, if only I had known that this happens, / When I set out for the debut, / That lines with blood – they kill,/They will rush through their throats and kill!”(B. Pasternak); "Above this rabid grub...";"The earth is bursting with heat. The thermometer is blown up"(E. Bagritsky).
Sometimes hyperbole is expressed by cardinal numbers: “In one hundred and forty suns the sunset was blazing" (V. Mayakovsky); "We are darkness and darkness" (A. Blok); "Twilight is directed at me but chi/A thousand binoculars on the axis"(B. Pasternak). In this case, they talk about subject exaggeration, i.e. these are not tropical hyperboles, but, as they are called, verbal-subject hyperboles. With the help of such hyperboles, F. Rabelais describes the meal of the giant Gargantua, who “began his dinner with several dozen hams, smoked tongues and sausage, caviar and other appetizers preceding wine. At this time, four servants, one after another, continuously threw full shovels into his mouth mustard." Mayakovsky also used this kind of hyperbole in the poem “150,000,000,” creating the image of “one Ivan.”
The opposite of hyperbole is: litotes(Greek litotes– letters, simplicity), i.e. understatement of any qualities of an object. Like hyperbole, litotes is used to enhance the expressiveness of speech: “What tiny cows! There are, really, less than a pinhead!" (I. Krylov); "No waist no thicker than a bottleneck" (N. Gogol); "The world is great, and I a grain of sand in this world"(M. Twain).
Irony(Greek eironeia– lit. pretense) - an allegory expressing ridicule. When using irony, a word or statement takes on a meaning in context that is opposite to the literal meaning or calls it into question. Thus, under the guise of approval, even admiration, there is hidden a negative attitude towards the object, even mockery of it.
I only notice in parentheses
That there is no despicable slander,
That there is no such absurdity
Not a square epigram,
Which would be your friend with a smile,
In a circle of decent people,
Without any malice or pretense,
Didn’t repeat the mistake a hundred times;
However, he is a mountain for you:
He loves you so much... Like his own!
(A. Pushkin)
Some researchers attribute irony to tropes, since words in an ironic text are used not in their usual meaning, but in the opposite, i.e., a change in meaning occurs (semantic shift). In Pushkin’s text, this refers to the words “without malice or pretense”, “mistake”, “he stands up for you”, “loves”, “like a native”...
Irony is the discovery of the absurdity of a positive characteristic of an object. Chatsky in “Woe from Wit” says “about the mind of Molchalin, about the soul of Skalozub.” I. Ilf and E. Petrov in “The Twelve Chairs” receive an ironic description of the “intellectual mechanic” Polesov, who was “not only a brilliant mechanic, but also a brilliant lazy person. Among handicraftsmen with a motor<...>he was the slowest and the most likely to get into trouble."
The highest degree of irony is sarcasm(Greek sarkasos- lit., tearing meat) - a judgment containing a caustic mockery of the person depicted. Unlike irony, where there is an allegory, in sarcasm the allegory is weakened or absent altogether. A negative assessment in the text often follows imaginary praise: “You will fall asleep, surrounded by the care of/Dear and beloved family/(Waiting impatiently for your death)” (N. Nekrasov). Sarcasm is characterized by a tone of indignation and indignation, which is why it has become widespread in oratory, as well as in lyrical and didactic genres: “In which footman/did you study this knightly technique?” (F. Tyutchev).
Antithesis(Greek antithesis– opposition) is a technique of contrast based on a sharp contrast of images or concepts. Antithesis is based on the use of antonyms - words with opposite meanings, and antonyms can also be contextual, i.e. antonyms only in a given context, as, for example, in M. Tsvetaeva:
Don't love, rich man, the poor woman,
Don't love, scientist, a stupid one,
Don’t love, ruddy, pale,
Do not love, good, - harmful,
Gold - copper half.
In the work of some poets, antithesis sometimes becomes one of the principles of poetics and thinking (Byron, Lermontov, Blok). A. Blok uses antithesis to emphasize the heterogeneity and contradictory nature of life, in which, nevertheless, everything is interconnected:
Erase random features -
And you will see: the world is beautiful.
Find out where light,- you will understand where dark.
Let everything pass slowly,
What in the world holy, what's in it sinful
Through heat souls, through cold mind.
In the poetry of classicists and romantics, antithesis acts as an aesthetic and philosophical principle of the polarity of human nature:
AND we hate we, and love we are by chance
Without sacrificing anything anger, neither love,
And some kind of reigns in the soul cold secret,
When fire boils in my chest.
Only in a person could it meet
Sacred With vicious.
(M. Lermontov)
Antitheses are used in the titles of works of art, emphasizing the main ideological opposition of this text - “War and Peace”, “Fathers and Sons”, “The Living and the Dead”, “Rich Man, Poor Man”.
There is a stylistic device that is the opposite of antithesis. It does not consist in opposition, but in negation, in “repulsion” from the extreme degrees of manifestation of any quality. "There was a gentleman sitting in the chaise, not handsome but also not of bad appearance, neither too fat nor too thin; it's impossible to say so that old, however It's not like he's too young"(N. Gogol).
A kind of antithesis is oxymoron(or oxymoron) (Greek. oxymoron– lit. witty-stupid) is a paradoxical phrase in which contradictory properties are attributed to an object, which contributes to the expressive perception of the text. Most often, an oxymoron is represented by a combination of an adjective with a noun, sometimes an adverb with a verb: “a living corpse” (L. Tolstoy), “sad fun” (I. Bunin), “looks into the eyes with impudent modesty” (A. Blok), “ It’s fun for her to be sad so elegantly naked” (A. Akhmatova).
Repeat- a technique expressed in the repeated use of the same words and expressions. The so-called lexical, or verbal, repetition has a different “pattern” and a different structure. For example, doubling, or repeating the word twice: “And again, again snow/Covered up traces..." (A. Blok); "Love love- says the legend..." (F. Tyutchev). The repeated chain of words can be longer: "There are black belts of rifles, / All around - lights, lights, lights..."(A. Blok).
Repeating nouns can have definitions with different locations: “Tatyana, dear Tatiana!” (A. Pushkin); “Foggy morning, gray morning...” (I. Turgenev); “Winds, winds, oh snowy winds...”; "Rus, my wooden Rus'!" (S. Yesenin).
One of the common types of repetition in poetry is anaphora(Greek anaphora– lit. pronouncement of unity of beginning) - repetition of the initial word in several lines, stanzas, phrases:
Do not sleep, don't sleep, work,
Don't stop working
Do not sleep, fight the drowsiness,
Like a pilot, like a star.
(B. Pasternak)
Anaphora is the opposite epiphora(Greek epiphora– addition) – repetition of final words. Epiphora is a rare occurrence.
Oh, happiness - dust,
And death - dust,
But my law is to love.
(E. Bagritsky)
Types of repetition include framing(ring): "It's muddy sky, night cloudy"(A. Pushkin) and junction: "Forget about the fact that life was,/about the fact that there will be life, forget" (A. Blok);
"They are not created for the world,/And there was peace not created for them..."(M. Lermontov).
The main function of repetition is reinforcement. Repetition enhances the rhythmic and melodic qualities of the text, creates emotional tension and expressiveness. In addition, repetition can be an element of the compositional organization of the text - repeated lines sometimes frame the text of the entire work, individual lines can begin stanzas, etc. Thus, in S. Yesenin’s “Persian Motives” many poems are designed in a similar way. In the poem "Shagane, you are my Shagane!" repetition frames each stanza and beginning-to-end.
A word repeated throughout the entire work sometimes acquires various shades of meaning, acquires special significance in expressing the author’s idea, and acquires symbolic depth. In this case, repetition becomes the leitmotif of the work. Thus, B. Pasternak’s poem “It’s Snowing” contains numerous repetitions of the title expression - at the beginning of the stanzas, within one verse and in adjacent lines;
It's snowing, it's snowing,
It's snowing and everyone is in turmoil...
At first, this expression is used in its literal meaning, then in comparisons personification arises (“in a patched coat/The firmament descends to the ground,” “the sky descends from the attic”), and an image of time is formed, which keeps pace with the snowfall: “Perhaps after year year/Follows, how it snows,/Or like words in a poem?" This association gives the key expression additional meaning and expression.
The role of repetition in psychological prose is important. With the help of this technique, the author expresses intense spiritual work, the confusion of the hero’s feelings, etc. In L. Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection,” Nekhlyudov, painfully experiencing his guilt before Katyusha and the unrighteousness of his entire life, endlessly repeats: “shameful and disgusting, disgusting and ashamed." At the same time, repetition also appears in the author’s speech (“he remembered”): “It’s shameful and disgusting, disgusting and shameful,” he repeated to himself, not about just his relationship with Missy, but about everything. “Everything is disgusting and shameful,” he repeated to himself.”
The role of repetition in folklore is specific, in particular in epics, where the repetition of words (including prepositions, conjunctions, particles) is associated with the creation of a special fairy-tale intonation, the tune of a folk verse.
Yes, he arrived co glorious to the city to Chernigov,
Does he city of Chernigov
Caught up with something silushki black black,
A th black black, How black crow
How either from that one or from Gryazi's Black,
Is it the same one? birch trees at gagging,
Yes, that one rivers at Currants,
U Togo cross at Levanidova...
A feature of folklore is the presence of non-linguistic repetitions in it, i.e. repetition of details, appeals to someone, listing of actions, plot repetitions, etc. Most often, such repetitions are threefold (three battles, three feasts, three kingdoms, three tasks ), which in ancient times had a sacred (or ritual) meaning.
Parallelism (Greek) parallelos- located or next to each other) is one of the types of repetition in syntax (syntactic parallelism). The types of sentences or phrases are repeated (their verbal content is not the same), and the word order also coincides, at least partially:
The forest drops its crimson robe,
Frost will silver the withered field...
(A. Pushkin)
The same constructions are given here: predicate – subject – definition – complement.
Sounded over the clear river,
It rang in a darkened meadow,
Rolled over the silent grove,
It lit up on the other side.
The predicate in impersonal form is a circumstance of place.
Parallelism also acts as an expressive artistic device. The expression of parallel constructions can be enhanced by antithesis, anaphora and other types of repetition.
I swear I first day of creation,
I swear his last during the day,
I swear by the shame of crime
AND triumph of eternal truth...
(M. Lermontov)
“I swear” is an anaphora, “the first is the last,” “the shame of crime is the triumph of truth” is an antithesis.
In addition to the concept of syntactic parallelism, there is the concept of “psychological parallelism” (A. N. Veselovsky), or “figurative” (G. N. Pospelov). The relationships between the elements of nature are considered as an analogy (parallel) of the relationships between people. This is a peculiar type of allegory that arose in folklore. The first part of this type of parallelism is the image of nature, and the second is the image of human feelings.
Oh, if only there were frost on the flowers,
And in winter the flowers would bloom;
Oh, if only I wasn’t sad,
I wouldn't worry about anything.
From F. Tyutchev:
Blocks of snow shine and melt,
The azure glitters, the blood plays...
Or is it spring bliss?
Or is it female love?
Psychological parallelism is clearly manifested in descending comparisons:
The young maiden will change more than once
Dreams are easy dreams;
So a tree changes its leaves every spring...
(A. Pushkin)
Gradation (lat. gradatio– gradual increase) – a chain of homogeneous members (semantic repetition) with a gradual increase (or decrease) of semantic and emotional significance. Gradation serves as a means of increasing the expressiveness of the text: "Not an hour, not a day, not a year will pass..." (E. Baratynsky); "All facets of feelings, all facets of truth/Erased in the worlds, in years, in hours" (A. Bely). Gradation is also found in prose: "Wow, what an abyss!.. It is impossible to describe: velvet! silver! fire!" (N. Gogol).
Pleonasm (Greek) pleonasmos- excess) - the use in speech of words that are close in meaning and therefore logically unnecessary (forward movement - “forward movement” is forward movement; free vacancy - “vacancy” means “free place”). Pleonasm can serve the purposes of stylistic expressiveness of both colloquial and artistic speech. "I saw This with my own eyes"(colloquial) life-being, sadness-longing, ocean-sea, stitches-paths(folklore), etc. In literature, similar expressions are used when stylizing folklore: “I command the ax sharpen, sharpen,/I command the executioner dress up"(M. Lermontov).
In poetry, pleonasm can act as an emotionally expressive means: " It's quiet around you silence"(F. Tyutchev).
Pleonasm can be a means of speech characterization of a character and a means of creating comic relief. In Chekhov’s story, Unter Prishibeev says: “there’s a bunch of different things standing on the shore people of people""on the shore on the sand drowned corpse of the dead person."
An extreme manifestation of pleonasm is tautology (Greek. taut about- the same, logos– word) – repetition of words with the same root. Expressive tautology is characteristic of colloquial speech and folklore: "I haven't read it, but I know..." (colloquial) fence the garden, wretched grief, lie down, wait and wait, white and white etc. Tautology is also found in poetry: "The shadow frowned darker" (F. Tyutchev); "Baptize with baptism fire" (A. Blok). Like pleonasm, tautology can be a means of folklore stylization. "I killed him free will" (M. Lermontov); "Oh, full-full box" (N. Nekrasov).
Expressive artistic techniques include denial, rhetorical question and rhetorical exclamation.
Denial in itself is more emotional and expressive than affirmation, but in artistic speech, especially in poetic speech, these qualities of negation are also strengthened in various ways:
I don't find it funny when the painter is worthless
Raphael's Madonna gets dirty for me,
I don't find it funny when the buffoon is despicable
Alighieri is dishonored by parody.
(A. Pushkin)
The negative construction “I’m not funny”, being an anaphor and part of parallelism, enhances the expressiveness of what is said.
In E. Baratynsky’s poem “Disbelief,” increased emotionality is created, in particular, with the help of an abundance of verb forms with negation:
Don't tempt me unnecessarily
The return of your tenderness...
I'm already I do not believe I'm sure
I'm already I don't believe it in love
AND I can not surrender again
Once you have changed your dreams!
My blind melancholy don't multiply.
Not. backwaters about the same words,
And, caring friend, the patient
In his slumber don't bother!
There is only excitement in my soul,
A Not you will awaken love.
It is possible to use different methods of negation simultaneously: repetitions of negative words, gradations, etc. All this serves as a means of increasing the emotionality and expression of negation:
No, no, no I have to Not I dare you Not Can
It’s crazy to indulge in the excitement of love...
(A. Pushkin)
No never mine and you no one's you will...
Negative expression is especially common among romantic poets. In E. Poe's poem "The Raven" each stanza ends with the refrain "never", creating an atmosphere of despair. Lermontov characterizes the Demon using a negative formula - “I am the one whom no one loves...”.
A rhetorical question does not require an answer. It can be addressed by the author to himself, to the reader, to society as a whole, to an inanimate object, a natural phenomenon, etc. Its function is to attract attention, enhance the impression, and increase the emotionality of perception. A rhetorical question seems to involve the reader in reasoning or experience.
In Pushkin's poem "The Singer" all three stanzas are constructed in the form of a detailed emotional question, and a repeating question frames the beginning and end of each stanza, that is, it is an element of the composition.
Have you heard the voice of the night behind the grove?
Singer of love, singer of your sorrow?
When the fields were silent in the morning,
The pipes sound sad and simple
Have you heard?
In civil poetry, the rhetorical question is used quite often, receiving a solemn declamatory intonation and combined with rhetorical appeals and exclamations:
I'll see, oh friends! unoppressed people
And slavery, which fell due to the king’s mania,
And over the fatherland of enlightened freedom
Will the beautiful dawn finally rise?
(A. Pushkin)
In meditative and philosophical lyrics, rhetorical questions often follow one after another, recreating the poet’s train of thought:
How can the heart express itself?
How can someone else understand you?
Will he understand what you live for?..
(F. Tyutchev)
And where will fate send me death?
Is it in battle, on a journey, in the waves?
Or the neighboring valley
Will my cold ashes take me?
(A. Pushkin)
Rhetorical questions with the same functions are also used in prose, mainly lyrical, mostly in the author’s digressions: “Rus'! Where are you going? Give me an answer” (N. Gogol); “Are their prayers, their tears, fruitless? Isn’t love, holy, devoted love, omnipotent? Oh no!” (I. Turgenev).
Inversion (lat. inversio– rearrangement, inversion) – a violation of the “natural” word order in a sentence, enhancing the expression of speech. The morning light played with blue tints– neutral, grammatically familiar word order. From M. Sholokhov: " The morning light played with blue tints"– inversion.
Inverse order in prose gives the statement a colloquial, folklore or poetic coloring, that is, it performs a stylistic function. So, for example, in “Prisoner of the Caucasus” by L. Tolstoy, with the help of word order, constructions characteristic of oral colloquial speech are created: "Visible the road from the crack goes downhill, to the right - saklya Tatar, two trees next to her. Dog black lies on the threshold, a goat with kids walks around - their tails twitch. He sees a Tatar woman coming from under the mountain young, in a shirt color, belted, in trousers and boots, his head is covered with a caftan, and on his head is a large jug tin with water. He walks, his back trembles, he bends over, and the little Tatar girl leads him by the hand. shaved".
Inversion with a poetic coloring is found in so-called lyrical prose and in journalism. In this case, definitions (adjectives or adverbs) are most often inverted: "Irreversible the night passed and hopelessly the autumn and deep sky stretched above him" (A. Blok); "Sorrowful weak grass rustled, a bony tartar crunched, sounded eternal consolation over eternal peace..." (V. Astafiev). In this case, the inversion creates an epically colored narrative, characterized by a certain elation of style.
Inversion is widespread in poetry, but there it does not play the stylistic and expressive role that it plays in prose. The function of inversion in poetry is to expose and emphasize the verse rhythm:
And the impossible is possible
The long road is easy
. Welleck R., Warren O. Theory of literature. M., 1978. P. 205.The man is amazingly made. You say: closed. He comes up, pulls the handle, and makes sure that it’s really closed. It’s the same with things of an intangible order: you know that something doesn’t work, something can’t be changed, something can’t be returned, that the trees won’t be big again - and yet you still hope.
You hope to prove to a person from the distant past that he was wrong, to explain to someone important that it is possible differently. It seems that this will help rewrite your “then” and at the same time correct something in such an unsightly “now”. You waste your energy, shout, explain, prove. You don’t want to believe that the person won’t understand.
Sometimes a little thing helps you switch. The psychologist, despairing of waiting for attempts to explain and prove to come to naught on their own, comes up with such a metaphor. Imagine, he says, that you and a person were born and raised on a desert island. Both were brought up in the realities of this island: the ocean around is endless, man is friend to man, comrade and food, there is no life on Mars (by the way, there is no Mars either - just like there is no other land besides yours).
The world is not limited to the island, you can live and love in a new way, turn your back on each other
And then one day you leave this island of yours and find yourself on the mainland. The picture of the world, of course, is collapsing - but a new one is being built on the rubble. The world is not limited by the boundaries of the island, you can live and love in a new way, turn your back to each other without the risk of getting a spear, hurray.
Motivated by good intentions, you, of course, swim back to the island and try to communicate with the person. But nothing works: you think in new, free categories, you try to talk about the mainland, but people don’t believe you. He hasn’t seen anything except his island and doesn’t want to see it. Because not everyone is ready for the collapse of their worldview. Because, whatever one may say, it hurts.
So what should I do? You can, of course, stop communicating - but this is not really a solution. So, escape. You can try to take him to the mainland by force. But he will most likely resist - you will both drown. You can continue to make connections in attempts to convey, explain, and convince. Or you can, every time you talk to a person, mentally “transplant” him to a desert island, realizing that this cannot be changed.
Separate the problem from yourself
Arina Lipkina, psychologist
Our lives consist of more events and relationships than those we select for ourselves and the stories about our lives. We tend to mentally return to what happened to us, “get stuck” on some events that caused pain, trying to prove to someone in the past that he was wrong.
But for our “now”, the only thing that matters is how we describe the incidents that happened then, how we interpret them, and what meaning and emotions we assign to them. It is important to learn to separate the problem from yourself - this is the only way to change your attitude towards it. It is useful to personify the problem: give it a name, explore it. The more the problem is personified, the more it is separated from the person.
Another way - become more competent and capable: for example, creating successful relationships with other people, developing the ability to solve various life problems. Yes, in the past, our loved one reproached us for something, but today we are no longer the same: now we know how to cope with difficulties that previously baffled us. New stories give rise to new, broader views of our past.
Throughout our lives, many of us carry a baggage of grievances against our parents: for criticism, indifference, or, on the contrary, ruthless words. But maybe the parents just didn’t understand us – their children – well? Maybe they behaved this way because of their fears, depression, despair or pain? Then does everything done and said have anything to do with us, with our personality? No. So is it worth staying in the field of the problem?
Letting go of the past is not the easiest task, but this is the only way to build a happy present.
Days, months and even years pass, and old emotional wounds and grievances do not seem to disappear. You are still angry at people close to you who once hurt you. You are trying to explain to them your own point of view, convey the pain you feel, prove that you are right, but they seem to deliberately ignore you, refuse to understand and accept you. You are ready to break your head so that a loved one sees the world the way you see it, but why, despite all your attempts, does it not work out?
Psychologists around the world are desperately struggling with the problem of misunderstanding in relationships. Someone else's worldview is a mystery shrouded in darkness. It can be difficult to explain to another person that, for example, the color green has many shades: emerald, light green, lime, pistachio and even marsh! The interlocutor will stubbornly stand his ground: there is only green and no more. Do you show him photographs of different things, clarify the shades, ask what color this item is? And you will hear the same answer: green.
Of course, in human relationships there are problems much more serious than figuring out color. Therefore, psychologists resorted to an even simpler island metaphor, reflecting the problem of misunderstanding of the interlocutor.
So, imagine that you and a loved one with whom you currently have a misunderstanding have lived on the same island for a long time. There is no one else here except you two: only trees, sun and sea all around. You, of course, grew up with the same principles and concepts about life: you need to catch fish with your hands, build houses from trees, and it’s better not to quarrel with local animals!
Having lived with a person in perfect harmony for a long time, you leave the island to see the world. Unexplored spaces open up for you, you feel like a pioneer and a hero. You are overwhelmed with new feelings and emotions. You get acquainted with shops - houses where you can buy fish instead of catching it with your hands. Your worldview changes radically. You, satiated with new emotions and gained experience, go to visit a close friend on the island.
You tell him about shops, cars and other delights of modern life, explain that you can live differently - much simpler and more pleasant. But what do you get in return? You see how the face of a loved one distorts a grimace: he looks at you with rejection, he believes that you have betrayed him. In your hearts you exclaim: “How can this be! This is truly the best way to live, not survive! Why is he rejecting this, rejecting me? After all, I wish him all the best!”
The metaphor of the island clearly shows how two people, once bonded by one experience, were separated by chance. The difference in worldview became clearly visible after some time. Two people have had different experiences and now look at life differently. On this basis, misunderstandings arise and quarrels break out.
Every time you want to prove that you are right to another person, remember the metaphor of the island. Mentally imagine that a friend, mother or father, brother or sister, grandmother or grandfather still lives on this island, and therefore simply cannot understand you. This will help you get rid of the habit of proving that you are right.
“Tumbler” by Oksimiron is one of the most favorite tracks of the artist’s fans. Many admitted that it was from her that they began to listen to and adore his songs. Oxxxymiron really did not spare interesting techniques and difficult comparisons when writing “Tumbler”. He captivated listeners with his individual literary style, and fans do not hide: “I want to put this track on repeat again and again.”
So, what does Oksimiron want to say with his “Tumbler”? This is truly a mysterious image and symbol that cannot be ignored.
Listen to the track “Tumbler”
“A pale young man with a burning gaze came out from point A to point B.”
It becomes clear to us that this road is the path of life, crazy, full of vicissitudes and thorns, but alluring. And... a foregone conclusion: from point “A” to point “B”. The alluring road that absorbs the entire young man is just a straight line, which can be easily drawn with one stroke of a pencil. In this geometric wretchedness, where everything is initially defined and banally simple, the hero began his triumphal march. With this one line, the author has already told us what will happen next.
And then he managed to “put on weight,” that is, to grow old and become a bourgeois, down-to-earth, narrow-minded man in the street with a kind of beer belly. He immediately drank away the knightly armor, which elevated him above the empty, everyday life, pointed to his high aspirations, strong principles and military exploits. He started out as a warrior, a winner, “a knight without fear or reproach,” but in Yesenin’s style he laid down his pants for a glass and married a washerwoman, the simplest girl, who was far from the princess’s throne. Some Oxy fans talk about his marriage as a sign of hopelessness, again a fall from the initially intended height. He himself does not know what he needs, all his intended goals lose their meaning. Life lands him and even brings him to his knees, but this does not kill him in the physical sense of the word. Only values become completely different and the material side of existence acquires special importance. “Man does not live by bread alone,” we remember Pushkin and understand that without taking into account bread, our hero is deader than God in the 20th century.
Routine makes people incredibly similar to each other, they involuntarily copy facial expressions and gestures, so “every second here is like that, there’s a swarm of them here.” All bees are the same, they all live to provide the hive with life-giving honey, but they do not realize it. If we humanize this metaphor, we get Pelevin’s loot and cattle artificially bred by vampires. And then another bee, another cattle decides to weaken and become a victim of a series of black stripes. At one point, he loses absolutely everything and gets far from what he wanted.
The traveler “learned from the dead, like the Danish prince from his father’s shadow.” This is about Hamlet, the hero of Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name. Let's remember what the crowned son learned? To sweep. He learned the truth about the conspiracy and the murder of his father, and his whole world turned into an inky cloak that was difficult to translate. Thus, the author hints that the shadows of his ancestors opened his eyes to the true state of affairs. He is unhappy because he feels the quagmire of vulgarity into which life is sucking him. Most likely, he learned it in books, and now he could not help but stand out from the “biomass and protoplasm.”
Hamlet, hero of Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name
There he picked up not only the knowledge of life, but also the ancient rules of cohabitation between people, such as tolerance and compliance with memoranda (diplomatic documents). The table of ranks was introduced by Peter the Great, but here it implies class inequality fixed in the subcortex. It turns out that only Makarevich does not bend to the world, but everyone else perfectly senses the boss and does not dare to blather against him. Otherwise, the path may end.
“Boomerang Back” – change everything? Or disappear completely into oblivion, since no one crushed the “louse of doubt”? Is it possible to change everything in a place where abstractions like report cards, distorted by our viciousness, define consciousness? Not even being, but God knows what.
People blame circumstances and don’t notice their mistakes, “you blame your soles and quit the race,” and then they wonder why the thorns last so long, and can’t wait for the stars to finally appear. And it’s not surprising, because after a series of failures one just wants to fall into Oblomovism - the great Russian melancholy. And the soles are not the same these days, are they?
“Slits in the shell” is an appeal to the end-to-end image of the chitinous cover in Oksimiron’s work. His hero is traditionally protected from the world by a shell, because his soul is vulnerable and soft, like turtle meat. For the rich soup of life - just right. The scabs planted by time became his prison and his salvation.
What does the hero do in his lonely captivity? Money. He bows to the idols of the theater according to Bacon - those “authoritative” points of view that are always right, because from childhood you are marinated in them. He is seduced by the correct and positive American dream: through thorns to success, and material success, and the stars have nothing to do with it. He, like everyone else, strives to make more money, and well-intentionedly wonders why others “rub it into their gums” - spend it on drugs and entertainment. The doubt is: “Maybe this is how it should be?” From this grows the second crooked path - hedonism and passion for self-destruction. Since everything is so miserable and petty, why do anything at all? And it will do!
Of course, drugs come to the rescue, those same “money in the gums”. The pursuit of lava and a career bow no longer makes sense, and never did; after ardent disappointment, apathy and despair come, and a person tries to forget himself, dissolving his consciousness in just anything.
So to hell with feeling sorry for yourself
Less worthless reflections and more reflexes,
When there is a clear goal, then empty wanderings become a quest.
Pity, thoughts about the past - all this goes to hell. Miron is ironic, saying that you need to think less, calling this activity useless, and calls for animal reflexes to be brought to the fore. All his goals here do not matter, they are artificial, life is just an interesting game in which there is no meaning, it attracts, but leads to a dead end, which we naively call the “goal”. Have we been trying to get a bank account all this time? And this is what happens, for the sake of which we wake up every day. But this is better than being homeless and strumming the songs of Alexander Nepomnyashchikh on the guitar? No, well, you can, of course, wander around a la forever young, but doesn’t it look funny on 50-year-old men and no less shabby women? So, after this, think about what the meaning of life is when freedom looks like a carnival procession to nowhere.
Chorus analysis: what does “tumbler” mean?
Tumbler is a symbol of an unshakable personality, a bizarre doll that does not fall, but only wanders in different directions and immediately takes the opposite position, it gets stuck and keeps between bizarre facets: the pursuit of money, utopian thoughts about the meaning of life, the thirst for success and narcotic contemplation. That is, the one who balances between, and does not go ahead, will win.
However, nooo, something is fishy here: maybe the tumbler is just neither fish nor fowl? Those same “moderate people in the middle” hated by Vysotsky? They have no conscious spiritual values, no opinions, they do everything like everyone else, and therefore are always right. This is their strength: neither here nor there. They repeat only verified and worn-out truths, do not risk looking for their own, and never climb the barricades. It is precisely such people who hold tightly to their little capsule and know exactly why they live. Exists.
And the strongest will survive, and thank you for that. This is the maximum, because we have already seen how the warrior drank away his armor, how he gave up and was blown away on the way to his point “B”. B – swamp. But even if he had continued his tortured knighthood, would he not have been driven back, like a raised floorboard, flush with the floor? Live, wash, please, but don’t flex your muscles: for any action there is a reaction, for any force there is a force.
Second verse: the teeth of fate
The first lines are clear - ironic lamentations of self-justification. The reasons for the fact that there is no need to go further and longer are in Divine inconsistency (like the Gnostics, the author doubts that this world is not the Creator’s mistake), inappropriate trinities of place, time and action. The knowledge that is needed in this erroneous and random world is not the kind that comes in handy on the television game “What? Where? When?" (the best players are given the crystal owls mentioned in the text). From this knowledge, it apparently follows that patience and willpower (don’t piss = don’t be afraid, and the play on words with the “sanitary zone” refreshes the text) will help to adequately overcome the vicissitudes and crossings of fate.
Humility is good, as they say, but the following lines tell how the crowds do not want to put up with the disappearance of the hero and write a statement against him to the ECHR - the European Court of Human Rights, located in The Hague. This means that Oxy fans are deprived of this benefit that gives peace of mind, and maybe this is for the best, because humility means silent solidarity with the world in all its horror.
By the way, he's still the same. The world does not give a damn about the individual, about her machinations in taverns and marriage beds, about her betrayal of herself. The world is still the same, the author repeats as a refrain, nothing important has happened. The person who came to this distance could not change anything, and could he, since his path is just a dotted line from point to point? Awareness of his insignificance and insignificance brings the hero to the bottom: since I can’t change anything, it means it’s better to find refuge among those who are as doomed as Gorky’s heroes.
A common metaphor that permeates this verse is an endless swim to the shore of that very “Swan Island”. There, however, is not a malachite bracelet, but Moloch in the image of the golden fleece - the ancient Greek symbol of wealth and prosperity. As you can see, the artificial goal of this quest has been invented and clearly defined: now the hero is not just floundering in the sea in the hope of being saved, like the passengers of Theodore Gericault’s “Medusa” raft, he is sailing to gold, like a brave filibuster. The fleece is worth this entire painful life. It is so?
Theodore Gericault, "The Raft of the Medusa"
The crisis mood of the creator, his helplessness “to convey what is in my skull of television programs” fleetingly passes by the listener. A cross-cutting theme and a cross-cutting pain: I know what, I don’t know how to convey it. But, apparently, it worked out.
“Ahead, as usual, only without the inseparable ones and without the bosom friends” - the illusions and hopes of finding someone for good and continuing the journey with him were left behind. Neither friends nor loved ones can settle here on a permanent basis - the scorched earth lurks in the pulp under the chitinous cover.
Dentistry was a type of corporal punishment of slaves in ancient Rome. It’s as if fate itself disciplines its slave, makes him stronger, so this torture is convenient for him. He knows everything about his situation, he is deprived of the veil of stupidity and naivety, so there is no longer any need to pretend: he is precisely the slave of this whirlwind, even though swimming is free. The contrast of the text indicates to us that, discarding the fictitious goal in the form of the golden fleece, we get the same formless wanderings - “free floating” - movement unencumbered by anything and anyone. Who gives the hero punches? The same meaningless world in which each of us is actually floundering alone. He still obliges us to swim according to his unwritten laws; we can only get out of the water into oblivion or indulge ourselves in mirages of swan islands.
Any swimmer is taken by surprise by pitfalls, which are also undermined by water. The unknown dangers of the world are hidden under this image; even the hero with a bleeding heel cannot avoid them. The stones lie in wait for the strong, just as Scylla and Charybdis (ancient Greek monsters) awaited the demigods of ancient Greece.
Scylla and Charybdis absorbing tourists
While someone is fleeing from reality (drug visions, for example), an archetype of world culture, an anti-hero, a trickster and a rogue - the Trickster - comes onto the stage. A deity who puts the game process above life. Usually this image behaves contrary to generally accepted dogmas of behavior, plays pranks and makes fun of everything that we value. They are found in life, in literature, and in mythology. Here he shows another answer to the question “What leads us?” Someone is carried away by the game of opposing everything, the so-called “shadow”, without which the light would not know what to do. The excitement of life can take us further and longer, the magic of protest and the romantic flair of nihilism will add color and new meaning to the voyage.
Third verse: what drives Oksimiron?
The hyperactive teenager from the first verse woke up and realized that childhood was ending, a long journey was already left behind. We can't continue like this. Despite calls not to feel sorry for himself, he still whined and believed chimeras - unrealistic ideas and dreams.
A feast during the plague is one of Pushkin’s small tragedies (a translation of an act from Wilson’s play), where the heroes, having cast aside mourning for their loved ones who died from the plague, feasted, despite the protests of the priest. They explained this by complete despair in the future: what role will piety play in the tragedy of widespread death? Youth, which fell during the plague year, cannot pass in sorrow. So our hero could not spend his whole life on self-pity and sadness for lost illusions. If cholera is everywhere, everywhere and does not stop, then why not love? No, there is even a doomed joy that gives a sharpness to feelings - to love under bullets, where no one makes plans for tomorrow and takes out an apartment on credit. The hero was just as desperate to catch pleasure.
Feast in Time of Plague
The pace of the hero’s life is accelerated many times over, the dynamics do not allow one to relax, “but here it’s either up a sheer wall or down a spiral.” He chooses a difficult climb and rebellion against all sorts of deities, be it Moloch, the Trickster or that narrow-minded Gnostic God who doesn’t really know anything. He is Camus's rebellious Sisyphus, who out of pride accepts his damnation and continues his senseless act in spite of his judges. According to legend, Sisyphus blasphemed and was proud during his life, so the Gods sentenced him to forever drag a stone up the mountain after death. The stone always fell, after which the condemned person resumed his work again. According to the interpretation of the existentialist philosopher Camus, the hero accepts the verdict in cold blood and is ready to once again spit in the face of his accusers, because he has not acquired any repentance or humility. Pride and a sense of his own superiority did not leave him. So our hero, knowing and realizing the futility and imperfections of human life, still strives upward, not downward.
Who is he: a tumbler, a trickster or the strongest?
What is the true meaning of the main image in the song is an open question. You can interpret it as a call to always rise, even if life has taken a turn. You might think that this is advice not to indulge in extremes and stand your ground, no matter how they try to put you down and nail you to the floor from the right or the left. Then our hero is the tumbler.
There is also an opinion that this is generally a negative image, which means the averageness of the mass consciousness of “moderate people in the middle.” We must choose the path and burden ourselves with the cross, so as not to live only materially, not to become this overweight husband of a thrifty and narrow-minded laundress. The cross in this case is a calling, a set of spiritual parameters that define a person’s life. If you dangle towards both ours and yours, bowing to everyone like a tumbler, then you can easily lose yourself in quotation marks, bows and reports. With this understanding, our hero is the strongest, opposing himself to the tumbler.
It is possible that the very desire to rise in order to break loose, to find an alternative path to everyone and to preserve the intransigence, independence and playfulness of a teenager is the desire of the inner trickster in the hero to realize his destructive potential, to play with life, to cheat, but still to lose in hedonistic self-destruction, because the song is filled with pessimistic images of the hero’s voluntary delusion.
Be that as it may, after all the analysis and word debate, the song still leaves its listeners a huge mental space for discussions, thoughts and “fruitless reflections.”
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