2022 Vol. 13 №4

Urban motifs in Russian poetry have not yet become the subject of comprehensive investigation in terms of the evolution of poetic conceptualization of the world, the frequency, semantics and syntagmatics of the key lexemes — 'gorod' and 'grad'. Meanwhile, the analy­sis of the poetic, ethnic and linguistic picture of the world, closely connected with diachronic lexicology, phraseology and grammar, allows important conclusions concerning the history of the national semiosphere and conceptosphere based on the analysis of the works of outstanding representatives of culture and literature of a nation. In the article, the author analyzes the usage, frequency, valency potential, and the system of poetic senses of the lexemes 'gorod' and 'grad' using the poems of reformers of the Russian language and litera­ture of the 18th century — Kantemir, Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, and, in com­pa­rative terms, against a wider temporal perspective, the preceding and subsequent texts of Rus­sian poetry. The lexeme 'grad' was often used in Classicist and Romantic poetry. From the 1830s onwards, it was used less frequently in its full version 'gorod'. The poets employed the lexemes 'grad' and 'gorod' to form tropes and figures of speech, striving to expand the tradi­tio­nal syntagmatics, especially in epithets. Lyrical texts retained sacred meanings and biblical allusions (sacred city, temple, heavenly garden, holy ‘vertograd’) in the development of urbanistic and battle themes.

The article analyses the collocations of the lexeme 'gorod (city)' with its paronyms — words that are pronounced or written in a similar way, not necessarily connected etymo­lo­gi­cally. These collocations, which appear in paronymic attraction and repeated many times, are called formulaic. The research presented in the article confirms the assumption that the stable pa­ronymic collocations do not unite random words but a type of mythologemes — 'gorod’, ‘go­ra’ and ‘doroga’. They reflect the concepts of two types of cities: concentric, eleva­ted on the mountain, and eccentric, located in the boundaries, encouraging to overcome them. The article explores the use of formulaic collocations ‘gorod — gora’, ‘gorod — doroga; ‘gorod — doroga — gora’ during the 20th and early 21st centuries. The research is based on the mate­rial of the poetic subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian language and the Card In­dex of the Dictionary of Russian Poetry of the 20th century. The study employs a variety of me­thods — corpus, semantic, syntactic and textual analyses.