Myth as a space of individual creative interpretation

Татьяна Автухович

Гродненский государственный университет имени Янки Купалы Филологический факультет Кафедра русской филологии
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9640-8673

Abstract

The article on the example of poems by Boris Pasternak You in the wind, a branch sampling (1919) and Joseph Brodsky Illustration (L. Cranach’s “Venus with Apple”) (1964) discusses the changing of the use of myth in the poetry of the twentieth century. Both poets turned to the myth of Adonis, but in the Pasternak’s poem myth presented by the image of an anemone, and in Brodsky’s by the images of a boar and Venus. It is shown that the poems of Pasternak and Brodsky demonstrate the process of the reduction of myth in the literature of the twentieth century and its gradual transformation into “ready” word of the culture. Modernism as any transitional epoch carries out the compression of the preceding culture, translating her quest and achievements in the area of “ready words”, and therefore refers to the archetypal images that allow to create the text with unlimited semantic potential. Both Pasternak and Brodsky use the iconic images of myth to visualize the meaning, which thus leaves in the subtext and is expressed implicitly. Modernist poetry is aimed on the individual-personal interpretation of the mythological images and on the creation of the artist’s own spiritual space. At the same time, the remythologization of the image and, as a consequence, the sacralization of the author’s inner space takes the place.

Keywords:

the myth of Adonis, the reduction of myth interpretation, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky