“Bilingualism” in the poetry of the 1980s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the transformation of political discourse into poetic, namely, to the stylistic and semantic transformation of names, precedent statements and concepts of official culture in unofficial poetry. The study is based on the material of “uncensored” poetry of the 1980s, the author analyzes the texts of poets belonging to conceptualism, ironic poetry, metarealism, schools that determined the development of the poetic language in the era of perestroika, but were formed in the underground. Their poetic rethinking of “sovietisms” coincided with the beginning of a critical period for the reception of “newspeak” in society and followed the socio-cultural situation of the era, in the context of the so-called “bilingualism” of the “first” and “second” cultures. Having set the goal of identifying the main types of stylistic transformations of “sovietisms” and analyzing the texts using intertextual, semantic and discursive analysis methods, the author identifies and describes two main strategies: a parody demythologization of Soviet concepts and realities (due to rethinking of precedent names, social idioms, patterns of speech genres and “sacred” texts) and work with a “foreign” direct speech (including verbatim quotation). Particular attention is paid to the use of documents as the basis of a poetic image and the attraction of classical Russian poetry to the creation of subtext. The author comes to a conclusion about the predominantly carnival nature of the poetry of the 1980s, speaking about the “speech masks” characteristic of each school and the manifestations of “verbal actionism”, which brings poetic tactics proper to the methods of forming political messages typical of artivism. The results of the research reflected in the article will be useful for studying the history of poetry, poetics, poetic and political discourses, and art practices of actionism.