TOWARDS A SOUND IN POETRY: YEGOR LETOV’S PHONOSEMANTICS

In this study we provide an analysis of Yegor Letov’s phonopoethics in the semantic aspect. The material of the study is Letov’s texts corpus. The main method of the research is phonosemantic analysis, that reveals semantic, emotional and psycholinguistic factors of poetic iconicity. As a result of the study the typology of iconic words in Letov’s texts is defi ned. It is shown that there are three types of relations between sound and denotatum: 1) onomatopoetic relation, implying the reproduction of acoustic denotatum; 2) iconic articulation relation, that recreates internal bodily states through articulation and “muscular sense”; 3) iconic articulation relation, that patterns images of external objects through articulation, resulting in the formation of “sound image”, which is a response to the sensory impression. The basic scenarios for working with sound are revealed: the zaum’ scenario that assumes analytical decomposition of a word into sound elements and the distant scenario that assumes working with sound within the syntagma (sentence — text). It is shown that the iteration of sound combinations at the level of the text and the corpus is connected with the poetics of key words, which in Letov’s texts are related not so much to the traditional semantic parameter as to the sound one. The key word in this case turns out to be the center of a vast phonosemantic network, the “sound-and-semantic concentrate”, and perhaps it predetermines the process of text generation. Correlation of iconic words with repetitive syntactic structures (“syntactical automatism”) is revealed. The possible psycholinguistic factor of this correlation is defi ned — and that is the weakening of the logical semantic operator, which leads to the intensifi cation of the sound principle of word choice and the appearance of the parataxis. Some typological correspondences between Letov’s poetics and modernist poetics that use similar phonosemantic mechanisms are found. The aesthetic function of the sound image is defi ned: the modeling of the inner reality image, in which the original image is not transmitted, but is sensed by the body. Achieving such direct sensory impact occurs through the use of articulatorysound mechanisms, which literally embed emotion in the body praxis. In conclusion, it is shown that Letov¡s iconic speech has the following features: iconicity, dominance of sound, diff use semantics, synesthesia, connection with the gestural component, aff ectivity, syntactic automatism. Structurally similar speech accompanies the altered states of consciousness, which fi ts into the avantgarde myth associated with the regressive scenario of a return to the roots.