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Abstract: The aim of the study is to analyze Joseph Brodsky’s poetic cycle “July Intermezzo” (1961), to identify the peculiarities of jazz strategies of the “big” poetic text and its components, to realize the connection between the cycle and the musical nature and to trace the artistic and semantic functions of the techniques chosen by the poet. The main methods used in the research process are cultural-historical and structural-semantic, as well as intertextual, presupposing the study of the dialogue between poetic and musical texts. The result of the work includes an analytical awareness of Brodsky’s jazz strategies in the process of creating a complex genre entity at the junction of music and poetry and their semantic interpretation, and comprehension of the process of adapting musical practices in the space of poetic text. It is demonstrated what means and techniques Brodsky used to appeal to the canons of jazz improvisation, and what mechanism of transfer of the rhythm and melody of jazz pieces to new poetic texts were employed. It is also shown how the theme of love develops in the texts “In a Letter to the South” and in “A Play with Two Pauses for a Sax-Baritone”, and how the nature of the “big poem”, to which Brodsky was attracted in the early 1960s, contributed to the realization of the poet’s creative search. It has been found by the authors of the article that against the background of other musical genres (romance, waltz, song, intermezzo, already recorded in the titles of the poems of the cycle), in the texts “In a Letter to the South” and in “A Piece with Two Pauses for a Sax-Baritone”, the musical “poetics” of the verse tends to the variative-improvisational dynamics of jazz and to freedom of its rhythm and movement.

About the author(s) :

Olga V. Bogdanova
A. I. Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University (Saint Petersburg, Russia)
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6007-7657

Tatiana N. Baranova
A. I. Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University (St. Petersburg, Russia)
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0516-2773

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 06.09.2022; date of publication: 30.03.2023

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