The Image of the Acacia in the metaphorical system of the Volodymyr Svіdzіnsky’s poem «Blind».

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the Volodymyr Svidzinsky’s poem «Blind». The basis of the analysis is the interpretation of the poem’s metaphor system. Based on the concept of metaphor as the heart of the aesthetic sense of the work, it justified the presence of three lyrical themes. Each one is accompanied by a certain set of specific artistic images. In the first story a simple manner presented in which are distinguished by their expressive semantics. This eliminates the semantics of their simplicity, bringing them closer to the character. In the second story, which poetically presents the human world are alien to natural phenomena, the system is very complex metaphors. Metaphorical simplicity of the first story and second story metaphorical complexity determine the appearance of the antithesis: momentary human suffering is completely suppressed eternally consuming the natural world. The third story is the most difficult to interpret, as carried out by using an unexpected way for style Svidzinsky acacia. This image has its own rich history in the literature of the Russian Empire. The plant Robinia pseudoacacia L. was named by analogy with this acacia grows on the Mediterranean coast. The Russian elegy of the first half of the twentieth century locust wrongly reinterpreted as acacia. After some time there works in which the image of an acacia discredited as a sign of a style that has outlived its usefulness. The second penetration acacia poetry becomes possible during the expansion of the role of the Romance in the popular culture. Thanks to the «high» works of authors such as Fet, Nadson, and thanks to the work of early imitation by Bely, Nabokov, Severyanin, the image of acacia becomes a canonical romance culture’s element in the literature of the Russian Empire. For several reasons the image of the acacia was not typical for the Ukrainian literature of the nineteenth century, so its distribution it is due to the influence of Russian literature. In the literature of the Russian empire (including the Ukrainian and Polish), the end of XIX – the first half of the twentieth century, there are three trends in the use of the image of acacia. The first trend is the stylization and imitation canonical examples of the elegiac poetry and the romance. The second trend is the parody. It is the use of the image of an acacia as a tool for creating allusions. Here the image of acacia becomes something of a symbol. This trend is the most stable and in some cases will last until our time. The third trend is the resistance to the acacia’s aesthetization. We refer the reader to the popular romance while aesthetics, while the image is ridiculed. With some degree of conditionality can be argued that taking pictures of the acacia used by the author as a symbol of rejection of the aesthetics, just as the dominant Russian literary tradition.