Abstract
The aim of the article is to study the specifics of the artistic comprehension of the theme of life and death in war and its figurative and symbolic representation in contemporary video poetry. The material for the analysis was A. Yurgaitis's video poetry film ‘Elegy to a Poet’, poetry of a submariner A. Lebedev, frontline diaries of a submariner G. Sennikov and a video based on Y. Drunina's poems ‘Zinka’. As a result, it was established that in the poetry and ego-documents of the submariners of the Great Patriotic War, as well as in the poems of modern poets dedicated to the war, life and death become peculiar mythoontological categories, and the compositional technique of constructing the text as a dialogue between a living hero and a dead hero (who died in the war) is often used. The method of mythopoetic analysis allowed us to prove that life and death in war are described with the help of mythopoetic and folklore images. The traditional images-symbols associated with death in the poetry of submariners are the images of sleep-death, a corpse, a rook, a candle and sea. The images of a submarine as a cradle and/or a boat as a coffin are associated with the mythological dual opposition of life/death in naval poetry and folklore. Modern video poets, inspired by the poetry of front-line soldiers, translate the same mythological plots and archetypal images in their poems dedicated to the war, which significantly enhances the suggestive potential of video poetic films.
Keywords
Video poetry, poetry of the Great Patriotic War, submariners, mythopoetics, Alexei Lebedev, Alexei Yurgaitis, Georgy Sennikov.