Fedor N. Dvinyatin, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Saint Petersburg State University, Universitetskaya Embankment, 7/9, 199034, St Petersburg, Russia. ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7111-0133
The article contains an attempt to analyze Brodsky’s poem “Clouds”. The elevated and heartfelt manner that distinguishes this poem is not quite typical for the author. The combination of continuous rhyme and short lines leads to the saturation of the text with sound parallels. Other sound repetitions are not related to the structure of the verse: these are paronomasia and vocal series. Two related features are noticeable in the description of the clouds: fluidity (the flow of one form into another) and hybridity (a paradoxical combination of different forms). The semantic component of the speech structure assumes numerous echoes of words and contexts in meaning. In several cases one can assume signs in absentia, mediating the connection between two words of the context: such an element is close to one of them in meaning, to the other in sound (for example, as the middle between granit “granite” and rubezh “border” one can assume granitsa “boundary”). Such cases are an additional means of creating sound-semantic unity of the text. The article also includes individual comments on some semantically difficult contexts of the poem.
J. Brodsky; “Clouds”; sound; meaning; verse; text analyses; structure of text.
10.02.2025
11.03.2025
Dvinyatin, F.N. “Brodsky’s ‘Clouds’: Sound, Meaning and Their Interaction”. Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal, no. 2(68), 2025, pp. 34–50. (In Russ.)
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