Ararat as the Main Pattern of the Armenian Text in Russian Poetry

Abstract

The paper explores the current direction of modern literary criticism — local texts, in particular — the Armenian text in Russian poetry. The purpose of the presented study is to determine the range of associative images that arise in the mind of a modern person around the lexical token “Armenia”. The authors conducted a survey of respondents in one of the social networks. One hundred and ten responses (mostly representatives of the academic, intellectual environment, with a reader's background) became the basis for statistical analysis. The most common answer came to be the word “Ararat”. In the verbal culture Ararat has become an image and pattern of the Armenian text. The authors analyzed semantic and functional levels of this image basing on the poems by Russian poets of the 20–21 centuries (in alphabetical order): M. Amelin, P. Antokolsky, V. Bryusov, Y. Veselovsky, A. Gaspari, A. Gitovich, E. Yevtushenko, V. Zvyagintseva, R. Ivnev, V. Inber, G. Kubatyan, I. Lisnyanskaya, O. Mandelstam, M. Matusovsky, B. Slutsky and B. Chichebabin. In the present paper the works on fixing the semantic universe of experimental by researchers V. Nalimov and Zh. Drogalina became the basis for constructing methodological analytics, as well as G. Garipova's research on meta-consciousness reflected in the literary text. Research methods included generalization and systematization of the obtained data, quantitative method, mythopoetic method, philological analysis of the text. As a result, the authors of the article talk about the semantic field of the Armenian text, in which the Ararat acts as the paramount pattern — in the individual and general cultural picture of the world. The material of the study may serve as an algorithm for working with other patterns of the Armenian text, information about which is present in the statistical calculations.