Sergei Yesenin`s Poetic Intonation (By the Example of the Poem Cycle ‘Persian Motifs’ and the Poem ‘My Way’

Abstract

The paper looks into the specificities of poetic intonation in Sergey Yesenin’s poems. Yesenin’s making as a poet took place in the Silver Age of Russian literature, which explains a syncretism of arts in his work. This concerns primarily a synthesis of poetry and music. The study focuses on poems from the “Persian motifs” cycle and a “short poem” “My Way” (“Moy put”). In songlike poems an intonational component, being the dominant one, finds its realization in the poem’s syntax. The analysis of the poems’ melody allows us to detect numerous chorus variations, which order the verses and underline their melodic cohesion. Melodic harmony is visible on the semantic as well as on the intonation and syntactic levels, including the composition, while alliterations and assonances account for the harmony of sound instrumentation of the poems. The paper also studies facture, an important concept which closely concerns the intonational component. The facture character of Yesenin’s poems is made up of the specificities of the metrics and rhythm, compositional-stylistic and rhythmic-intonational devices, pauses, stresses, author’s punctuation, etc.