“Sing in Different Rhythms”: the form, content, and pragmatics of the poetic stylizations of “Iskra”

Abstract

The corpus of poetic parodies, satires, and stylizations of Iskra, based on precedent texts of the 1860s, is considered in the sociological (Benjamin, Bourdieu, Jampolsky, Rejtblat), semi- otic (Lotman, Toporov), cultural (Bakhtin) and semantic-pragmatic (Penskaya, Kulikova, Tselikova, Shabalina) aspects. Considering the stylizations of Dmitry Minaev, Viktor Burenin, Vasily Kurochkin, and Pyotr Veinberg, the author of the paper depicts the role-game strategies and tactics aimed at carnival rethinking of everyday and political reality. The analy- sis of the poem “My pseudonym” reveals that Iskra became a trademark, a brand, with its sig- nificance substantially exceeding that of a single name. Of particular illustrative value are the cases when a pseudonym was passed from one editor to another with no independent value. It is found that the satires and stylizations of “Iskra,” as well as most other democratic publi- cations, are characterized by a conscious secondary form, the use of mnemonic matrices; the neglect of the author’s name in favor of the “party” name; metonymic transfers, the pictures of provincial disorder, particular evidence of general misfortune; metaphorical transfers, car- nival rethinking (Bakhtin) of the canonical imperial history; the creation of an alternative lit- erary project. The combination of these properties turns the field of satirical weeklies into a “collective” Don Quixote, proteanly associated with book culture and yet neglecting condi- tional but false prescriptions. The parodies considered combine baroque with postmodernist aesthetics, making these texts open for further interpretations and commentaries.