The supertextual unity of the christmas, italian and love pretexts in the poem "I was only what" by J. Brodsky
The work is devoted to the study of Joseph Brodsky's poem «I was only what» (1981), part of the poetry collection «New stanzas to Augusta», compiled directly by the author himself in 1983. The article puts forward a hypothesis about the functioning of J. Brodsky's special unconventional supertext unity with a lyrical meta-plot of initiation and cognition through love, the creative work of a lyrical hero in love. In the course of the analysis the authors consider the main content and poetic features of Brodsky's chosen text as a potential semantic center of the selected supertextual unity, actualize the connections of the poetic markers highlighted at different levels of the text, establish correlations with other lyrical works of the poet that are part of a potential supertextual unity. It has been shown that in addressing his leading theme of human realization and the formation of the individual's creative potentials, Brodsky steadily synthesizes the three leading «private» texts of his own extensive metatext: Christmas, topos (in this case Italian), and love texts. The poem «I was only what» is considered as the semantic center of the designated supertext unity, embodying in a concentrated form all the main signs of the unity and integrity of the cycle. lyrical plot and the system of characters, imagery, motif and thematic structure, chronotopic originality, intertextual levels and allusive layers. The analysis demonstrates that the perspective of singling out and modeling the supertextual unity is extremely fruitful, allowing us to reconstruct the logic of the writer's artistic mindset and recreate the image of his mythopoetic world picture. Thus, in Brodsky’s poem «I was only what» the interference of the pretextual layers, «large» and «small», saturates the connotative components of the subtext and focuses the central motive line of the plot - the creation, that gives the lyrical hero the ability to gain sight, hearing, voice, that is, to speak, and potentially to create, in particular, to be a poet.