AUTHOR’S METAPHOR AND IDIOSTYLE: THE CASE OF BRODSKY

The paper studies one of the semantic types of metaphors peculiar to Iosif Brodsky’s poetry, “identifi cation metaphors” (the term of V. P. Polukhina): A is B, it is considered on the example of the poem “Noon in the Room”. With the help of these metaphors, Brodsky realizes invariant motif of his works: the loneliness of the lyrical self / person in a space endowed with abstract features of being as such, and this creates the characteristic for the poet attitude towards a distantly analytical perception of reality. The “philosophical” nature of Brodsky’s poetry is manifested not in the use of identifi cation metaphors per se (purely quantitatively inferior to the same metaphors in Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva), but in the variety of predicates, whose semantics paradoxically reduces to abstract me anings. A form of maxim or aphorism, claiming to be conceptual rigor, comes into confl ict with the metaphorical nature of predicates. At the same time, peculiar metaphorization of the meaning of the grammatical subject takes place. One of the diff erences between the poetics  of such metaphors in Brodsky from metaphors of this type, for example, in Pasternak, Tsvetaeva or Mayakovsky, is the use of philosophical concepts as subjects and predicates. Another diff erence is the refusal of both Pasternak and Tsvetaeva to ascribe to the subject a certain common attribute with the help of predicates-metaphors — the meaning of the concept being defi ned is ambiguous and inexhaustible. And fi nally, partly in Tsvetaeva and certainly in Pasternak, identifi cation metaphors are built primarily on the basis of emotional associations, including those caused by connotative rapprochements, which mean both sound and visual properties of objects. Brodsky’s metaphors-copulas with semantics of identifi cation in the function of subject (and sometimes in the predicate function) often consist of lexemes with an abstract or generalized meaning. The identifi cation metaphor is an expressive feature of the poet’s idiostyle.