Toward the semantics of trochaic pentameter. On an archiplot in T5fmfm

Abstract

   The article problematizes the concept of the ‘semantic halo’ of Russian poems written in the meter of Mikhail Lermontov’s ‘I walk out alone upon my way…’ [‘Vykhozhu odin ya na dorogu…’], trochaic pentameter with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. Analyzing two dozen representative poems, written mostly in the 20^th c. but going back to the 18^th, the author formulates their common archiplot that partly differs from the one established for the ‘Lermontovian cycle’ by Kirill Taranovsky in his pioneering work and critically reformulated by Mikhail Gasparov. The suggested revision (prompted by the author’s detailed analysis of a 1964 poem by Evgeny Evtushenko) concerns the epic component of the archiplot, much more pronounced in the considered corpus of about 300 poems. The invariant theme of this predominantly epic archiplot is ‘Persona’s Encounter with Greatness.’ The article discusses the four principal variants of the archiplot determined by the choice of the persona’s remarkable partner: a living person, a historical / literary figure, an animal, a location (country, city, river, building).