POETICS OF DAVID PATASHINSKY


2022. № 1 (31), 357-369

St. Petersburg State University

Abstract:

The article analyzes the neology of David Patashinsky, a Russian poet living in America. The attention of the author of the article is focused on several stylistic dominants associated with the deviation from a variety of norms of the modern Russian literary language. These are phonetic, semantic and grammatical deformation of words and forms, non-standard syntax. Particularly interesting are the shifts in lexical semantics caused by metonymy, genitive metaphors, phraseological derivation of images, and sy- naesthesia. The most numerous in Patashinsky’s texts are grammatical anomalies. They aff ect almost all semantic and grammatical categories. The article examines nominal syncretism, changes in the gender of nouns and the class of adjectives, the transitivity of non-transitive verbs, non-normative refl exivity of verbs, unusual participles, the instrumental adjectival case in the restrictive-explanatory sense, the instrumental case attached to the verb, the dative case as a means of personifi cation, the adverbial government of verbs, constructions with the infi nitive adjoining a personal verb form. At the end of the article, some contexts are given in which many linguistic transformations are concentrated. The idiostyle of D. Patashinsky is largely unique, because the multiple transformations of lin- guistic units in their mutual infl uence, caused by semantic compression, cover all levels of language and unite modern literary language with elements of dialects and linguistic archaicism. Word and form usage in this author’s poetics is often mysterious to the reader and arouses linguistic interest.