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Abstract: The aim of the article is to discover the author’s strategies of realization of the spell genre in E. Letov’s poetry. The author of the article poses a hypothesis that these strategies are realized at the textual and communicative-pragmatic levels. In view of this, the study employs the systemic-typological method, which allows determining the plot-compositional forms of the manifestation of spell in Letov’s lyrics and outlining the contours of the similarity between the pragmatic-communicative model of the spell and Letov’s literary texts. As a result, the folk prototype of the spell text, which underlies a number of Letov’s famous songs, was reconstructed in the work. This prototype includes three key components: the incantatory core, the narrative, and the elements of the rite. It has turned out that the incantatory core of Letov’s texts, oriented towards the spell canon, is associated with the genre of black magic death spell, demonstrated by both the semantics of imperatives and the special subjective structure of Letov’s texts. So, the image of a dead man, whose function is to help the soul separate from the body through the pronunciation of certain spell formulas, is their central image. The author argues that the death spell in Letov’s poetry loses its primary aim: undergoing “refunctionalization”, it encodes in a special way the author’s main plot associated with the lyrical subject’s existence in liminal states, involving separation of the soul from the body. In some cases, the incantatory core correlates with a reduced spell narrative, which is a plot of a journey beyond a limited space, which in Letov’s lyrics metaphorically means the separation of the soul from the body. Both the core and the narrative often correlate with the images of magical objects that were actually used in real ritual practice and from there migrated into literary texts. The study proves that the ritual-actional component initiates the pairing of Letov’s poetic avant-garde “actionism” with archaic magical rites – in both cases, work with the word is aimed at changing a certain “order of things”.

About the author(s) :

Olesya R. Temirshina

Moscow University named after A. S. Griboedov (Moscow, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0127-6044

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 10.01.2023; date of publication: 30.06.2023

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