Underground poetry of the 70s in the course of Russian as a foreign language

Abstract

A b s t r a c t . The article examines the possibility of using poetic texts of the Russian underground of the 70s at the lessons of Russian literature for students of Russian as a foreign language at the B2 level and above. The pur-pose of the study is to assess the literary merit of the material selected, and to analyze the possible strategies for its inclusion into the course of Russian as a foreign language. The experimental study involves methodological and literary commentary, taking into account both the nature of the poetic text and the context of the lesson, as well as the existing canon of representative texts of Russian literature, the expansion of which is facilitated by the choice of new material for study. The integrated teaching approach is combined with the close reading method, which provides the lesson a peculiar structure and a specific pattern of the teacher’s interaction with foreign students. Special accent is placed on the following: the priority of working with visual metaphor, as well as with metabola (metametaphor); gradation of the lesson from the first cognitive level of comprehension to the highest level of seeing into symbolic and structural connections and contexts; heightened attention to students’ motivation to study an “ unusual ” text in connection with such motives as learning about the world, love, pain and the methods of interpretation of such states. The structure of the lesson, set out as a result of this research, is based on the needs of foreign students, the necessi-ty for the teachers to actively interact with them, and the need for appropriate intercultural training. The study makes a contribution to the selection of little-known texts for teaching language and literature to foreign students studying Russian in the Slovak environment, as well as to the issues of investigation of the creativity of the Russian underground of the 70s, meta-realists