SYNESTHESIA OF COLOR IN THE POETIC LANGUAGE OF ANDREI BELY

One of the main trends in the symbolist literature in the first half of the 20th century was the expression of attitudes towards objective reality. Words lose their main meaning and are used in figurative senses, creating the possibility of forming any correspondences. Colors become symbols that characterize certain mental states. The symbolists sought to find, in the words of Andrei Bely, “other means of cognition and communication”, other means of artistic expression. Bely also believed that “the lack of color hearing in the artist of the pen and brush is a flaw”. He cited vivid examples of synesthesia in his poetic work: “ashen chaos; hoary past; hoary delusions; motley dream”. The choice of material is due to the fact that synesthesia is one of the key techniques that carries both an emotional-semantic and symbolic load, which models the fi gurative structure of Andrei Bely’s poetic text. This article attempts to consider the phenomenon of color synesthesia in the writer’s poetry. Based on the material of a working sample from the compiled corpus for the “Dictionary of the color of A. Bely’s poetry”, the component analysis of  words that are the basis for the formation of synesthetic phrases is considered. Among the studied poems by Bely, synesthesia is present at the formal level in all texts. There is a certain hierarchy in the system of figurative means of the writer’s language, where each stylistic device occupies a certain place. Since synesthesia crosses two or more sensory images, binomial synesthetic constructions and polynomial ones were distinguished. The selected words are described, parameters for their characteristics are given, and tables of examples of synesthetic color combinations are compiled.