Article

Name: Tower of Babel: From Symbol to Language Methods (‘Gorgorod’ by Oxxxymiron)

Authors: I. O. Dementev

I. Kant Baltic Federal University, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article deals with the concept rap album Gorgorod by Oxxxymiron (a nickname of the Russian rap musician and poet Miron Fyodorov). The narrative describes a biography of a poet Mark who had avoided to participate in the political life of his city with the fictional name Gorgorod but later decided to join the resistance movement after his meetings with other characters – Alice and the Guru, the leader of the opposition. The rebellion failed but the mayor of Gorgorod let him go. Later, Mark was murdered by an unknown person; his poem “Where we are not” became his final text talking about the fictional world (probably, the Celestial City of new Jerusalem).

The research in the paper relies on the hip-hop studies and the analysis of the multilingual code and anagrammatism by Prof. Maria Dmitrovskaya. This approach allows to decipher the implicit levels of the semantics and to demonstrate how the text is organized by the language methods applied by the author.

The key image in the text determining the author’s philosophy is a Tower of Babel (the cover of the album reproduces the little version of the ‘Tower of Babel’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder). The myth of Babylon refers to such mythological motives as viciousness and pride. The research of the Babylonian pretext makes it possible to reveal the language method of the author: Oxxxymiron uses various styles and languages creating the effect of the polyphony reflecting the drama of the unsuccessful construction of the tower in Babylon. Among such means one can find the homonymy and homophony in different languages (favela vs favella), logical errors (identified only by the decoding of the multilingual code, for instance: ‘plutocracy is intertwined with power’ while the Greek kratos means ‘power’), usage of metaphoric equivalents of the key notions. The analysis of these multilingual codes reveals the layer of the Bible pretext of the Gorgorod.

The paper considers both explicit and implicit presence of the tower’s image in the text. The tower is a combination of a vertical and a circumference, openness and closure. The semantic complexes are distributed throughout the text in each track (there are such words representing the “circle” lexemes as Russian krug, Latin globus and circus, French arrondissement, ancient Greek κύκλος etc.; the same principle is realized in cases of “vertical” and other lexemes). The author argues that this method of the text construction manifests the mythopoetic thinking immanent to Oxxxymiron. A typical feature of this thinking is the organization of mutual transitions of the microcosm and the macrocosm, which can also be shown by the example of the writers’ selection of lexemes. The semantic complexes of fate, home, interweaving, significant for Oxxxymiron, are supported in the text both by lexical means and by anagramming. Thus, the image of the Tower of Babel symbolizes the search for harmony as well as its failure.

The paper also argues that the name of the protagonist is of great importance: Mark comes from the Latin ‘hammer’. This image is also embedded into the text (Russian balda ‘hammer’ etc.). The article further demonstrates the potential of the image of Mark the Evangelist as a prototype of the protagonist of the Gorgorod, as well as the parallels between Venice, whose patron was Mark the Evangelist, and the place “Where we are not”. Besides, the multilingual analysis shows the significance of other lexemes and motives connected with the Mark’s name (border; darkness; water; happiness and death). This approach mobilizes anagrams of Mark’s name in different languages (ancient Greek μάκαρ, μακάριος; medieval Latin marca; English mark; Russian MoKRoe, MoRoK, MRAK etc.). All of them support the same semantic complexes of border, death and fate.

The last part of the research refers to Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorso o Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua (ca. 1524). There is a reason to suppose that some motives of this work (the disintegration of a common language and the perspective of its re-creation) are reproduced in the Gorgorod. The paper reconstructs also some intertextual relationships between writings by Machiavelli and Oxxxymiron. Finally, the author argues that Oxxxymiron represents the Babylonian story as a case for his reflection on the nature of language and one of politics. Thus, the text of the Gorgorod is an example of a poet’s masterly work with a language.

Keywords: anagram, ‘Gorgorod’, language game, Miron Fiodorov, multilingual code, Oxxxymiron

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