Yu. M. Lotman "Analysis of the poetic text"

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The works of the famous literary critic Yu. M. Lotman have become desktop textbooks for many generations of humanities. They are distinguished by amazing erudition, fascinating depth, stunning power and clarity. One of them is "Analysis of the poetic text".

Lectures on Poetics

The material for the work of Yu. M. Lotman "Analysis of the Poetic Text", published in 1972, was "Lectures on Poetics" (1964), revised into "The Structure of the Artistic Text" (1970). Yuri Mikhailovich developed the same material in different ways for readers and specialists. The book consisted of analyzes of twelve poems, from Batyushkov to Zabolotsky.

In the 60s, such an analysis was practiced within the walls of universities as a good example for students. Later they began to appear in print. Prior to this, the only books with an analysis of the poetic text were works on the skill of Pushkin, Mayakovsky or Ostrovsky, ironically called Masterstvovedenie. The appearance of analyzes of individual poems was progress. And Yuri Mikhailovich made an important step - he made it more detailed. In short,Lotman in "Analysis of the Poetic Text" dwells in detail on all aspects - from the structure of the poem to the differential features of phonemes.

Text path

In the ranks of literary critics, accustomed to talking only about "high thoughts and feelings", analyzing the poems of great poets, Lotman's work was treated with rejection. What was it? In Soviet times, literary criticism was based on the method of Marxism, where materialism and historicism coexisted, which can be characterized by the well-known axiom: "Being determines consciousness." Ideology taught otherwise, which they carefully tried to hide.

Lotman was serious about the methods of Marxism, and the ideology - as it deserves. Starting the analysis of the poem, he adhered to the rules of materialism: first of all, there are the words of the poet written on paper, it is on them that our understanding of the poem is based. But the path from the text to the poet's thought is subject to formalization, Lotman argued, and in 1969 he explained this in one of his articles, analyzing Pasternak's early poems.

Artistic challenge

In the work "Analysis of the poetic text" Lotman studies the text not in the light of the experiences it causes, both personal and public. The text is considered here as a whole, that is, its ideological and artistic components. How is it built? Why exactly? In the Preface, the author dwells on this in detail and explains that all the functions of the text are interconnected:in order to fulfill an artistic task, the text also has a moral function, and vice versa, in order to fulfill, for example, a political role, the text must also fulfill an aesthetic function.

According to Lotman, the analysis of a literary text “allows several approaches”: from consideration of historical problems to moral or legal norms (etc.) of a particular era. In the book discussed in this article, the author proposes to explore the artistic meaning of the text. Consequently, of the numerous problems that arise in the analysis of the text, Lotman in his "Analysis of a literary text" considers one - the aesthetic nature of the work. It is with this that the famous work of Yuri Mikhailovich begins.

Eloquent examples

The book consists of two parts. In the first one, the author dwells in detail on the tasks and methods of literary analysis, explains that not everything that is inherent in the text is included in the reality of the text. It is created by a system of relations, that is, everything that is included in the structure of the text. Structure is, first of all, a systemic unity. The connection between the concepts of "system" and "text" manifests itself in different ways.

The author gives an example: a group of pedestrians crossing the street is viewed differently by a driver, a policeman and a young man. The driver does not care how pedestrians are dressed, the main thing for him is their speed and direction. The young man and the law enforcement officer pay attention to other things. So it is with the text. The same text can be decorated in different ways, and the samethe structure is embodied in several different texts. The author proposes to consider a poetic text as an organized semiotic structure.

Structure of the verse

In the first part of the "Analysis of the Poetic Text" Lotman dwells in detail on the structure of the poem, opening it with a chapter on the tasks and methods of text transmission. How is it transmitted? Signs that also have a dual essence: they convey both a certain meaning of the word, for example, “order”, and lexical, historical, cultural, and similar meanings. Therefore, a sign is a replacement, content and expression cannot be identical.

Signs do not exist as an accumulation of some independent units - they form a system. Language is systemic, as it is formed by the presence of rules. And in the "Analysis of a Poetic Text" Yuri Lotman proposes to dwell on this in detail. Language is the most important component of the text. Through it, reality turns into an artistic model. Literary language should be different from ordinary. In addition, the language of prose and the language of poetry are different.

"Bad", "good" poetry

Lotman devotes a whole chapter to this, then stops at artistic repetitions and continues to work with a thorough analysis of the structure of poetic speech - what is rhythm, meter. Rhyme in "Analysis of a Poetic Text" Lotman devotes a separate chapter, considering the problems inherent in it by examples. The chapters "Phonemes", "The Graphic Image of Poetry" continue Lotman's work. the firstpart of the book is completed by chapters on the composition of the poem and the conclusions of the author.

The second part of Yu. M. Lotman's book "Analysis of a Poetic Text" is a detailed analysis of the poems of Pushkin, Batyushkov, Tyutchev, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Blok, Tolstoy, Zabolotsky, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky. As readers write in the reviews, the book can be recommended not only to specialists or students, but also to ordinary readers who are interested in literature. It is written in an accessible language, the author gives simple and clear examples for everyone.