Язык «второго рождения» Бориса Пастернака: идиоматика, семантика, визуальность

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role of idioms in Boris Pasternak’s collection The Second Birth (1932), a topic which has not yet received scholarly attention. The idiomatic level of the Russian language, with its fixed connotations, provides Pasternak with material for sophisticated metaphors, and simultaneously for transmitting conventional and easily recognizable meanings. Thus, the focus on idioms offers an opportunity to explain clearly how a balance of simplicity and complexity is achieved in a work that stems from the poet’s transitional period. In the first section of the article, we discuss the main types of Pasternak’s treatment of idioms; in the second, we provide a number of illustrative examples, analyzing the intertwining of various phraseological modifications in the context of stanzas. In our reading, we pay close attention to the relationship between semantic and visual features of Pasternak’s verses, and in the third section, we discuss the topic of visuality in Pasternak’s poetry from a theoretical point of view. Idioms, we conclude, are not only an essential part of Pasternak’s poetic language, but also represent an area that opens up a new frontier of research.