In search of the marvelous: linguistic study of the surreal image

Ludmiła Pradiwlannaja

Национальный Педагогический университет имени М.П. Драгоманова, кафедра общего языкознания и германистики, института иностранных языков, Киев, Украина
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1752-8613

Abstract

At the beginning of the XX century surrealists rebelled against traditional culture and expressed their lack of faith in rational world perception. Instead, the artists and poets drew attention to imagination and focused on the study of the unconscious and irrational. They attributed great importance to the image which became the core of their aesthetics and was assigned the role of a vehicle for bringing forth into the conscious mind the creative forces of the unconscious. Surrealist imagery is verbalized through the cult of metaphor, synesthesia, arbitrary and spontaneous combination of words. In our work we consider approaches to the concept of the surreal image and explore linguistic peculiarities of N. Zabolotsky poetry. Nikolay Zabolotsky is a Russian poet of the literary and artistic avant-garde group OBERIU whose early poetic experiments (published in the book of poetry Stolbtsy in 1929) bear certain resemblance to the poetry of French surrealists. Though he mostly describes everyday life, routine surroundings typical for his time/ place, he does this with irony and love. The irrational world of N. Zabolotsky is created through illogical combination of words, absurd imagery, personification, metaphors.

Keywords:

surrealist poetry, image, N. Zabolotsky