Article

Name: “Not a penny to my name, however much I do”: the faith plot and his ‘routine’ devastation in J. Brodsky’s poetry

Authors: Dmitry I. Ivanov, Dmitry L. Lakerbai

Xi’an International Studies University, Xi’an, Shanxi, China; Ivanovo State University, Ivanovo, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: The debating points of Brodsky’s religious subject and agenda are considered within this paper alongside with the specificity of the poet’s lingual personality cognitive-pragmatic program (CPP) in the aspect of generalized paradigms connected with faith, personal salvation and consolation. “The faith plot” of Brodsky’s oeuvre is considered in skeptically, desperately and heroically selected terms of common creative life “from the void and to the void”. Brodsky’s “archaic” cognitive-pragmatic set (a selfish appeal to supreme forces in terms of his poetical mythology) ascends to a global cognitive-pragmatic program of modernism (that revises the man-God relationship in artist’s favor). Starting with the “pernicious” void, the poet comes to the salutary one, keeping the Logos out of destruction by existential absurd. The power of faith in Word and Literature, implicitly powered by romantic (neoromantic) myth of artist underlying the entire modernist life-creation, gradually transfers the essence of the question from the religiosity with its global consolation and salvation possibility into an individual form of “quasi-religiosity”, through strictly devastating the religion symbols and filling them with purely artistic meaning. The poet as a “tool of language” is happy in his existential despair for he is reunited with his deity and gives him the features of the universal power. The choice within an “epilogue” version of modern life-creation is nevertheless limited by skepticism, despair, and romantic heroism. While accepting life as the Gift, the poet does not accept its order and the idea as something more significant, mysterious, and solemn than our distressful ego and finds salvation in one of its manifestations – the Word.

Keywords: J. Brodsky, poetry, metaphysic, logos, cognitive-pragmatic program, romantic heroism, the void, orphanage

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