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Abstract:

Characteristic features of the poetics of “Anna Snegina,” as in Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” are different kinds of contradictory “cohesion” in the text of Esenin’s work. The article focuses on the plot and image structure of the poem, where, as it is assumed, the image of the miller occupies a key place, serving as a point of attraction and at the same time generating the center of all contradictions in the depicted world of “Anna Snegina.” It is noted that the semantics of the images of the mill and the miller, specific to folklore and mythological discourse, is clearly manifested in various semantic variations in a number of works of Russian literature, defining the originality of the love storyline and forming a stable literary tradition, which is reflected in Esenin’s poem. At the same time the Esenin’s miller does not always correspond to the traditional images — both folklore and literary, which is analyzed in detail in the article. The research establishes that the absence of political convictions, opinions, reflexive manifestations in the miller as a character of the poem puts him outside society, outside the human world in general — he is not involved in it and unfolding historical events. However, without the miller the plot of “Anna Snegina” would not have taken shape. He is a guide, a voluntary mediator, and this is his purpose in the text, and for the fulfi llment of such a “functional” neither the miller’s work, nor the mill, nor the magic and sacred knowledge imputed to the miller in folk culture are don’t matter. The miller is a poetic image, a literary function, free from the burden of the ordinary and mystical, but skillfully, with thin threads, connected with the mythology of the miller as a guide between worlds. It is argued that the special role of the miller in the fi gurative structure of the text, connected with the multidirectional manifestations of folklore and literary traditions in relation to the “mill scheme” in “Anna Snegina,” give rise to the effect of contradictory “cohesion”, which are a “conscious constructive idea” (Yu.M. Lotman) of Esenin’s work.