Звукообразы в поэтике О. Ф. Берггольц
Sound Images in Poetics by O. F. Bergholz

Summary/Abstract: The sensory poetics of O. F. Bergholz’s artistic texts has not yet been specifically studied. Since childhood, the poetess was immersed in the folk song element and had a keen perception of the auditory sphere; for her, the “memory of sound” was the most important associative link in building an artistic picture of the world. When creating the image of the Valdai arc in the autobiographical novel “Day Stars,” it is the sound substance that has a function of meaning generation. The author’s distinct sound image of the Orthodox prayer read by nannie Avdotya in the “Day Stars,” is considered in the article in comparison with the icon of St. Seraphim of Sarov, described by Bergholz. The sound metamorphosis of the prayer functions as a conductor of the sacred meaning of the iconographic ecphrasis in the text of the story. Leningrad is the most representative image in Bergholz’s work; the city’s acoustic space is modeled by the author based on the historical context. The heightened perception of the sonosphere of the post-revolutionary city contributes to the creation of unusual sound metaphors in the “Day Stars” (talking, screaming walls; crying stone). In the “Leningrad Symphony” screenplay, the sound of a metronome, which arose on the eve of the blockade ordeal, is associated with Shostakovich’s Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony. In blockade-related lyrics, the visual (color) characteristics of images are replaced by auditory ones; the sounds of war — whistling, screeching, clanking, grinding, crunching — carry a negative connotation of destruction and death, and the creaking of the runners of blockade sleds is a sign-marker of death. The semantics of silence are ambivalent; at the same time, silence and soundlessness are semanticized in different ways: soundlessness in an existential sense is juxtaposed to sound as the death of life; the beginning of “universal death” occurs when sound “died” in space; the sound/ringing/noise returned to the world is isomorphic to life.

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