Title of the article:

“OVERCOMING SYMBOLISM”: IRONY IN ANNA AKHMATOVA’S LYRICS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1910s

Author(s):

Yulia V. Shevchuk

Information about the author/authors

Yulia V. Shevchuk — DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, А. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3784-2100

E-mail: julyshevchuk@yandex.ru

Section

Philological sciences

Year

2023

Volume

Vol. 70

Pages

pp. 261–275

Received

January 28, 2023

Approved after reviewing

February 24, 2023

Date of publication

December 25, 2023

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37816/2073-9567-2023-70-261-275

Index UDK

821.161.1.0

Index BBK

83.3(2Рос=Рус)53

Abstract

The article proposes ways to solve the problem of the specifics of acmeistic irony based on the material of Anna Akhmatova's early lyrics. In the early 1910s acmeists entered into an open dialogue with symbolists, offering a new artistic attitude and forms of its implementation in a poetic word. The acmeists opposed the "hopeless" irony of their predecessors, who realized the intractable conflict between the individual and the "collective". For Akhmatova, a dialogue with I. F. Annensky was important, in whose poetry the subject plan creates a symbolic paradigm and is a symbol of the tragic clutch of I and the Other. The irony in Akhmatova's work was initially due to such a basic feature of the poet's artistic thinking as a constant feeling of the possibility and even the need for a different view, a different point of view. The nature of this poetic phenomenon is thus dialogic and intersubject. Self-irony as an internal and external device of sharpening allows the poet to speak in a new way about a woman, her creative potential and the drama of her personal fate. Forms of irony are revealed through analysis of male and female masks of lyrical self, through images and motifs, complex subject organization of poems. The intersubject and dialogic nature of the heroine's experience opens the reader up the possibility of perceiving a lyrical event in several semantic perspectives (dramatic/tragic and ironic). Hidden irony is revealed by a holistic analysis of individual works.

Keywords

Symbolism, Acmeism, Irony, Anna Akhmatova, Dialogism, Subjective organization of the poem.

References

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