The Bilingual Poetry of Leonid Kiselev in the Dialogical Aspect

Abstract

This article addresses the phenomenon of bilingualism in the poetry of Leonid Kiselev (1946–1968), which is analyzed as the basis for the internal dialogic nature of the Kyiv poet’s lyrics. The immanent dialogism of Kiselev’s poetic thinking is already manifested at the level of the lexical-syntactic organization of his poems (the abundance of interrogative constructions, addresses to a conventional interlocutor, etc.). But conceptually significant for Kiselev was the dialogue with poets of all times and countries, among whom the Kiev poet chose his like-minded people and teachers, such as Taras Shevchenko, Osip Mandelstam, and Pavlo Tychyna. The article analyzes various ways of conducting poetic dialogue between Kiselev and these and other poets, oſten realized in a bilingual mode. It has been revealed that the interaction of Ukrainian and Russian linguistic and literary contexts in his poems is carried out with the help of bilingual verbal constructions (for example, the symmetrical use of Russian and Ukrainian equivalent prepositions in the poem The Tale of Igor’s Campaign); Ukrainian epigraphs to poems written in Russian; allusions (for example, a politically charged allusion to Nikolai Gumilyov’s poem Worker, which is read in the process of back-translating a line of Kiselev’s Ukrainian-language poem into Russian); and figurative dialogical exchanges between Kiselyov’s own poems written in Ukrainian and Russian.