Yu. M. Lotman “Analysis of a poetic text”

The works of the famous literary critic Yu. M. Lotman became desktop textbooks for many generations of humanities. They are distinguished by amazing erudition, bewitching depth, stunning power and understandability. One of them is “Analysis of a poetic text.”

Lectures on poetics

The material for the work of Yu. M. Lotman, “An Analysis of a Poetic Text,” published in 1972, served as “Lectures on Poetics” (1964), revised into “The Structure of a Literary Text” (1970). Yuri Mikhailovich developed the same material in different ways for readers and specialists. The book consisted of an analysis of twelve poems, from Batyushkov to Zabolotsky.

In the 60s, such an analysis was practiced within the walls of universities as a good example for students. Later they began to go out in print. Prior to this, the only books with the analysis of the poetic text were works on the skills of Pushkin, Mayakovsky or Ostrovsky, ironically called "Mastery". The appearance of the analysis of individual poems was a progress. And Yuri Mikhailovich took an important step - made it more detailed. In short, Lotman in his "Analysis of the Poetic Text" dwells in detail on all aspects - from the structure of the poem to the differential sign of phonemes.

Text path

In the ranks of literary critics, accustomed to talking only "about high thoughts and feelings," while analyzing the poems of great poets, Lotman's work was rejected. What was it like? In Soviet times, the basis of literary criticism was the method of Marxism, where materialism and historicism coexisted, which can be described by the well-known axiom: “Being determines consciousness”. Ideology, however, taught otherwise that they carefully tried to hide.

Lotman took the methods of Marxism seriously, and ideology the way it deserved. Starting the analysis of the poem, he adhered to the rules of materialism: first of all, there are the poet’s words written on paper, it is on them that our understanding of the poem is based. But the path from the text to the poet’s thought is subject to formalization, Lotman argued, and in 1969 explained this in one of his articles, examining Pasternak’s early poems.

Art task

In The Analysis of a Poetic Text, Lotman does not study the text in the light of the experiences he provokes, both personal and social. The text is considered here as a single whole, that is, its ideological and artistic components. How is it built? Why so? In the “Preface”, the author stops at this in detail and explains that all the functions of the text are interconnected: in order to perform an artistic task, the text also has a moral function, and vice versa, in order to fulfill, for example, a political role, the text must also realize an aesthetic function.

According to Lotman, the analysis of the literary text “allows for several approaches”: from considering historical problems to moral or legal norms (etc.) of a particular era. In the book, which is discussed in this article, the author suggests exploring the artistic significance of the text. Therefore, of the many problems that arise in the analysis of the text, Lotman in "Analysis of the literary text" considers one - the aesthetic nature of the work. It is from this that the famous work of Yuri Mikhailovich begins.

Eloquent examples

The book consists of two parts. In the first, the author dwells in detail on the tasks and methods of literary analysis, explains that not everything that is inherent in the text is included in the reality of the text. It is created by a system of relations, that is, everything that is included in the structure of the text. Structure is, first of all, system unity. The connectedness of the concepts “system” and “text” is manifested in different ways.

The author gives an example: a group of pedestrians crossing the street, the driver, the policeman and the young man look differently. The driver does not care how pedestrians are dressed, for him the main thing is their speed and direction. A young man and a law enforcement official pay attention to other things. So with the text. The same text allows for different decorating methods, and the same structure is embodied in several different texts. The author suggests considering the poetic text as an organized semiotic structure.

Verse structure

In the first part of Poetic Text Analysis, Lotman dwells on the structure of the poem, opening it with a chapter on the tasks and methods of text transmission. How is it transmitted? Signs that also have a dual nature: they convey both the specific meaning of the word, for example, “order”, as well as lexical, historical and cultural, and the like. Consequently, a sign is a replacement, content and expression cannot be identical.

Signs do not exist as a cluster of certain independent units - they form a system. Language is systemic, as it is formed by the presence of rules. And in "Analysis of the poetic text," Yuri Lotman offers to elaborate on this. Language is an essential component of a text. Through reality, it turns into an artistic model. Literary language should be different from everyday. In addition, the language of prose and the language of poetry are different.

"Bad", "good" poetry

Lotman devotes an entire chapter to this, then dwells on artistic repetitions and continues with a thorough analysis of the structure of poetic speech - what is rhythm, meter. Rhyme in "Analysis of the poetic text" Lotman devotes a separate chapter, examining the examples of the problems inherent in it. The chapters "Phonemes", "Graphic Image of Poetry" continue Lotman's work. The first part of the book is completed by chapters on the composition of the poem and the conclusions of the author.

The second part of Yu. M. Lotman’s book “Analysis of a Poetic Text” is a detailed analysis of poems by Pushkin, Batyushkov, Tyutchev, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Blok, Tolstoy, Zabolotsky, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky. As readers write in reviews, the book can be recommended not only to specialists or students, but also to ordinary readers who are interested in literature. It is written in an accessible language, the author gives simple and clear examples to everyone.