2021 Vol. 12 №4

The article departs from two non-referential functions of language — the poetic (expres­sive) and conative (appellative) functions — described by many linguists starting from Ro­man Jakobson and Karl Bühler. Their combined effect is shown using examples of linguistic techniques from the two types of discourse — the Russian literary avant-garde and the avant-garde advertising-propagandа — outreach. A discursive analysis of Russian literary (experi­mental) and advertising (avant-garde) texts is carried out from the standpoint of the theory of linguistic creativity. For each of the working subcorpora (artistic and advertising discourses of the 1910—1930s), the authors distinguish macro-discursive, micro-discursive and inter-discursive parameters that affect linguistic innovations at different levels — from phonologi­cal to pragmatic. It is concluded that the strategy of delayed, de-automated perception is im­plemented in the experimental literary discourse. It is achieved by focusing the message on its own form (the implementation of the poetic function). In the avant-garde advertising, the message should be as clear as possible in its form and should be easily perceived by an ad­dressee (the implementation of the conative function) not to focus attention on the text but rather on the action that the reader is expected to perform on the object of reference.

The article deals with a ‘literary scandal’ as a mode and a script of communication within cubo-futurists poetic circles as far as the communication between poets and their addressees during a public performance is concerned. The latter is an essential component of the “literary everyday routine” of the poetic circles analysed. Not only does scandal betray an intention of insulting the recipient but also it is due to the scandal that the avant-garde author could find the addressee, become closer to him and make him more engaged in a poetic happening. The goal of the study (based on the evidence of cubo-futurist public performances) is to describe a scandal as a communicative script, a frame, identify a potential addressee, single out reception profiles and analyse communication orientations underlying those profiles. Drawing on the understanding of a literary scandal suggested by Reitblat, we trace a connection between a scandal and the public (recipients). According to Warner, the public are people actively par­ticipating in an event. Participatory strategies of the cubo-futurists public could be nar­rowed down to three types of reception: a sceptic, a critic, and a potential ally. Using the speech act theory (Austin, Derrida) and the actor-network theory (Callon’s opposition of framing and overflowing), we analyse how the performative utterance functions in a given context. We show how the performative utterances carrying a seed of a potential scandal were construed (or could have been construed). The article analyses the interpretation of a scandal and com­municative strategies chosen by recipients. While the critic prefers to frame the utter­ance in a predictable way by placing it into a fixed context and literally interpreting the ut­terance, the ally, on the contrary, is open to a variety of contexts and is ready to participate in a play of the pragmatic unfolding of an utterance. The latter type of reception underlies the possibility of the recipient’s creative engagement with a communicative experiment of the avant-garde.

The article is devoted to the study of the poetics of reduplication in Alexander Vveden­sky's fiction texts. The aim of this research is to analyse the functional range of reduplications at different textual levels, from the lexical to the thematic. Reduplication is understood as one of the most important tools of Vvedensky's linguopoetic experiment, aimed at the 'revision' of the ability of language to signify and represent the world and its basic semiotic principles. For Vvedensky, the non-normative punctuation of contact lexical reduplications creates prerequi­sites for perceiving repeated word forms as occasional homonyms, distinguishes the signified behind the signifier, and also problematizes the nature of poetic communication. On the grammatical level, reduplication creates tension between repeated grammar patterns and their lexical realisations, which allows Vvedensky to demonstrate the potential extensibility of syn­tactic models and make grammatical semantics a compensatory mechanism that fills the se­mantic void of the poetic utterance. Vvedensky's thematization of reduplication as the "dou­bling of the world" is a mirror, which deforms and transforms reality. Mirror semiosis illus­tra­tes the loss of iconicity by reduplication and, as a consequence, the impossibility to repre­sent the object by its reflection. The authors conclude that on the level of vocabulary and gram­mar, reduplication creates dynamism in the verbal space of the text, activates its inter­pre­tation and thus creates the situation of gnoseological doubt in the adequacy of language as a means of representing the world. In the thematic field, it deprives the world of its self-iden­tity since objects constantly multiply, lose their distinctiveness or, on the contrary, find mea­ning where it does not exist.

The article explores the category of interdiscursivity from a perspective of its realization in films. As a point of departure, the historical ties of the avant-garde and cinema are ana­lyzed in terms of interdiscursivity. Literary and artistic works of the representatives of the Russian avant-garde are characterized by a number of innovations that are relevant for the understanding of the interdiscursivity in cinematography as art. The established avant-garde foundations of interdiscursivity make it possible to define it as a linguocreative appropriation of discourses and to elaborate a methodology of its study in films. The film “Stalker” is select­ed as an object of research due to the fact that Andrey Tarkovsky’s innovative cinematic ap­proach makes his works akin to the approaches of art innovators of the avant-garde epoch. The specificity of the interdiscursivity of “Stalker” is determined both by a significant degree of transformation of its literary basis and by a varied appropriation of certain types of discourse in the process of making a film as an original artistic-aesthetic object. Elements of different types of discourse act as linguistic and creative means that influence the heuristic potential of the verbal system of a film.

The article is based on a chapter from the author’s book Russian Formalism: A Metapo­etics (1984). It deals with the poetics of Roman Jakobson formulated during his stay in Prague from 1920 to 1938 and treats this subject from an epistemological perspective outlining three incompatible scholarly/artistic trends which informed it: Husserlian Phenomenology, Saus­surian linguistics and Russian Futurism. From Husserl, Jakobson borrowed the concept of “expression” (Ausdruck) — the sign whose self-sameness was absolute. But he departed from the German philosopher by conceiving of this semiotic identity in terms of a Saussurean “so­cial consciousness.” And he further relativized it through the modernist notion of “de-familiarization” — an incessant drive of poetic signs for an aesthetic rejuvenation. To miti­gate the tension between Phenomenological stability and Futurist instability, the essay con­cludes, Jakobson grounded his poetics in phonology: the universal system of distinctive fea­tures common to all languages that is impervious to any violations.

The article investigates a religious and philosophical dialogue of Miłosz and Dostoevsky. The antinomic content of Miłosz's poem “Theological Treatise” is analyzed in the context of Dostoevsky's Christocentric worldview, as well as religious and heretical teachings of early Christianity, which aroused Milosz's interest throughout his career. In their works, Dostoev­sky and Miłosz explored the theological problem of apoсatastasis and offered their interpreta­tion of it. The paper also examines Miłosz’s contribution as an essayist to the comparative study of Dostoevsky's works (Dostoevsky — Mickiewicz and Dostoevsky — Swedenborg). The ideological basis of “Theological Treatise” is the dialectical relationship between faith and truth, which is associated with Miłosz's appeal to Dostoevsky's ‘creed’ from his famous letter to Fonvisina. Like Dostoevsky, Miłosz criticizes the natural-scientific concept of truth in its depersonalized and, therefore, dehumanized version, which seems to the author of “Theologi­cal Treatise” as an instrument of ‘devilish theology’. In a dialogue with the traditions of Rus­sian religious philosophy, and above all with Dostoevsky’s legacy, Miłosz turns to the Apoca­lypse, in which the most aesthetically significant the idea for him is that of ​​restoring paradisi­acal existence. However, unlike Dostoevsky, the concept of life after death in “Theological Treatise” is not free from pessimism and skepticism. Miłosz is inclined towards the ideological paradigm of the West, and the concept of “Theological Treatise” includes the ideas of Dosto­evsky's unbelieving heroes.

Irony is considered as an evaluative category in literary and artistic discourse. The au­thors point out such typical features of ironic evaluation as implicit character, i. e. the ability of irony to present the evaluative position of the author in a veiled form, subjectivity, which is directly dependent on the author's attitudes and ideological intentions, negative colouring of ironic evaluation and a high degree of its impact on the reader. The authors identify the basic techniques of expressing ironic assessment in Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel “The Golovlyovs”. The peculiarities of ironic evaluation are analyzed, and the forms of expressing irony are iden­tified. The main techniques of expressing irony in the novel are antiphrasis, unexpected ironic inference from a situation, antithesis, the use of inappropriate collocations that do not fit the context, intertextual inclusions, intentionally created absurd situations, and rhetorical ques­tions. The main feature of ironic evaluation in the novel is its satirical basis, its distancing from humour and the focus on the denunciation of human vices and social flaws in the histor­ical period of the domination of the landlord class. Ironic evaluation in Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel is an important component of the Saltykov-Shchedrin's ideostyle and reveals the speci­ficity of his narration and the peculiarities of the writer's worldview.