THE BUSH IN ALEXANDER KUSHNER’S POETRY: SEMANTICS OF IMAGERY

Abstract

The article deals with one of the most frequent imagery in Alexander Kushner’s poetry — the bush. The source of the research is the whole corpus of the poet’s lyrics — from Kushner’s first poetry collections in 1960s to his latest magazine publications. In studying the semantics of the imagery we strive to employ a complex approach, using elements of comparative historical, formal and structural methods. Among Kushner’s floral imagery (the garden, the tree, the bush) it is the bush that appears the most important and ambiguous. The article demonstrates the meaning of the imagery (as A. Ariev states it, the bush is the Kushner’s “main metaphor of life”) and its agreement to Kushner’s poetics (attention to the small, the private, the day-to-day. the proportionality to the man, the publicity waive. It is shown that there is a persistent comparison of the bush and the poet’s lyrical ego. For the first time, the following functions are revealed: 1) bush as a part of the landscape, including the urban one, and as a marker of Leningrad/Saint-Petersburg space; 2) bush as a limit between the worlds: a) between the mudane life and the death; b) between the mundate life and the higher divine existence; 3) bush as a metaphor of death: the imagery of a broken, fruitless and snow-covered bush symbolises the death as an oblivion; 4) bush as a metaphor of eternal life: the imagery of a flowery bush may be used as an icon of an “eternal spring” that awaits the human beyond the limits of earthly life. In addition, Kushner’s bush is tightly connected to the whole topic of creativity, seizing of speech and divine presence (the Burning Bush). The article shows complexity, ambivalence of the imagery. Refs 9.