BENEDIKT LIVSHITS’ SONNETS

The paper discusses some peculiar features of composition in Benedikt Livshits’ poems based on the model of sonnet. The material under consideration includes ten original sonnets by this author and excludes all the translated sonnets, because the compositional structure of the latter is largely determined by that of the originals and therefore requires comparative approach and should be considered separately. The composition of the ten Livshits’ original sonnets is discussed in a series of aspects, including meter, stanza, rhyme, rhythm, lexical, grammatical and thematic specificity. In particular, consideration is given to the distribution of lines representing various rhythmical and grammatical structures, as well as different types of syntactic relations and bonds between lines. Eventually, the composition of the discussed poems proves to be based on a number of isomorphous structures, or a more or less general framework that constitutes composition of all the original sonnets by Livshits. The framework closely resembles the one used by M. L. Gasparov, who analysed the composition of Livshits’ poems from his “Petersburg cycle”. Moreover, this interest to sonnets, although untypical in the context of Russian Futurism, helps Livshits to address the same artistic challenges and fulfil the same creative concepts that inspired his most radical experiments in Teplo or Nochnoi vokzal.