Symbolics of the Soul in the "Black and Blue" Book of Poems by A. Ladinsky (On the Question of the Artistic World Specifics)
The article considers a representation of the soul and its symbolism in the «Black and Blue» (1930), the first book of poems by A. Ladinsky in the aspect of poetic anthropology. As a representative of the Parisian poetic branch of the first emigration wave, A. Ladinsky constructs a unique artistic universe based on the opposition of the earthly and heavenly aspects of human existence. The poet’s work reflects the conceptual understanding of the dichotomy, expressed by the physical-material «bottom» and the divine-spiritual «top», produces the actualization of the «soul» microcosm as a value-semantic center of the depicted world. The analysis of A. Ladinsky’s poems, based on the combination of anthropological, semiotic, and mythopoetic approaches to the artistic text, shows that in the poetics of the «Black and Blue» the idea of the soul is revealed in a system of interrelated, but not identical to each other personifications and symbolic signs. The article indicates four key parameters of the soul representation: 1) its objectification in the mythological images of the Muse and Psyche; 2) actualization of «flight» and «lamentation» motifs symbolizing and universalizing the views of the exiled human fate and the experience of death; 3) the contact of the earthly and heavenly existence dimensions realized through such symbols of the soul as a «butterfly», «breath», «smoke», a «heart»; 4) the endowment of the soul with the status of «eternal femininity» embodying the beloved who is ideal and therefore inaccessible to the male lyric «self». It is concluded that in A. Ladinsky’s mythopoetic universe the soul embodies the indelibility of the vital movement of the opposed microcosm and macrocosm. Therefore, in the conception of the «Black and Blue» the myth of the immortal human soul becomes the main line assisting to understand the deep antinomies of the universe.