A Cumulative Principle in the Figurative Structure of the Lyric Poetry of Leonid Aronzon and Joseph Brodsky

The study defines the tendency of modern poetry to gravitate towards enumeration and registers as an attempt to “restore” the cumulative figurative language, which has not a conditionally poetic, but mythologically real status. From the standpoint of historical poetics, such a language is interpreted as a series of outwardly heterogeneous, but semantically identical phenomena, rooted in the archaic consciousness. The specifics of the worldview in the lyrics of L. Aronzon and J. Brodsky, namely, a complex of motifs represented with the help of cumulative structures, is the subject of study. The study asserts that, having a stable “semantic halo” (extensive assimilation of reality as a set of equivalent elements), accumulation performs a wide range of tasks, forming bundles with different, if not opposite, motifs (“unity and magnificence” of the world — Aronzon; discreteness of being and its overcoming — Brodsky). A detailed analysis of both authors’ poems allows to identify both invariant (historically determined) and variative (individual creative) features of the cumulative figurative language.