Article

Name: Exegi monumentum: from ode to confession. The change of plot code

Authors: Yury V. Shatin

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: The paper is devoted to the change in the plot organizing principles in during the evolution of the ode of Horace “Ad Melpomene.” According to “Aesthetics” of Hegel, every ode involves the struggle of the power of the content and the subjective freedom of the poet. Overcoming this split provides the creation of a “complete and united whole.” Thus, the duality of the ode is the contradiction between the architectonics stability and rhetoric mobility. Such a split can be observed in such a variety of genre as the ode of Horace “Ad Melpomene.” It is supposed that the evolution of ode of Horace in Russian poetry had two trends. The first trend was connected with Derzhavin’s ode and included the substitution of ancient mythology by modern geographical and autobiographical symbols. The second trend was connected with Pushkin’s poem “I have built myself a monument” which was organized as a special hierarchy of senses by the change of the verse metre in last lines of each stanza. At the same time, Pushkin used the method of transreminiscention (term by A. I. Zhuravleva and V. N. Nekrasov), which transformed the rhetoric of the poem into the lyric confession. Pushkin substituted a synecdoche by a metonymy and created a new code of the plot, with the motive of immortality being actualized through personal freedom. The creation of a new plot code by Pushkin led to the evolution of this genre in the XX century. The main contribution to this evolution is considered to be made by Vladimir Mayakovsky “At the top of my voice. First prelude to the poem” and Vladimir Vysotsky “A monument.” While maintaining the confession as the global sign of genre, both poets solved the problem of immortality differently. In “At the top of my voice,” one may observe that “the turn from futurism to primitivism was viewed as a natural development of avant-garde principles as an evolution from constructing the expression of forms to the strategy of life-building’ (I. Plehanova). In that period, the immortality was understood by Mayakovsky as a sacrifice of personal “I” for collective “We.” Vysotsky understood the immortality as the destruction of a monument and ecstatic emergence of a revived poet. It is worth noting that both poets used the principle of the hierarchy of meanings invented by Pushkin.

Keywords: Оde of Horace, code of plot, hierarchy of senses

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