Каламбуры Бориса Пастернака в сборнике «второе рождение»

Revue des Etudes Slaves. 2021. Т. XCII. № 2. С. 307–324.

Krasilnikova T., Uspenskij P.

The article focuses upon puns in Boris Pasternak's collection The Second Birth (1932). Since the analysis of the language game was almost entirely replaced with the analysis of polysemy, puns have not become the subject of a special study. Within the framework of this approach, the ambiguities in the poems were interpreted as “Aesopian language” or the “author’s deafness”. According to the article, the cases of linguistic ambiguity in The The Second Birth are the phenomena of poetical irony. Basing analysis on phraseology as a fixed linguistic material, we show how the transformation of idioms creates puns. The article examines examples in which Pasternak playfully transforms fixed expressions or constructions taken from the Soviet discourse (the second section), as well as the language game that is not related to ideology (the third section). In the latter case, we are interested in the linguistic mechanisms of pun creation – from explicit semantization of idioms to subtle ambiguity arising from language associations. The puns that permeate the collection reduce the degree of seriousness and form the ironic modality of the poems. The Second Birth thus balances not only between the simplicity and complexity of language, but also between the pathetic and ironic modalities.

Keywords: idioms, идиоматика, поэтика, poetics, лингвистика текста, text linguistics, Boris Pasternak, Б. Л. Пастернак, soviet subjectivity, советский субъект, pun, Каламбур, The Second Birth, Второе рождение