Памятник памятнику: О стихотворении Марии Степановой Я памятник тебе / себе на месте этом зычном… .......... 429

MONUMENT TO A MONUMENT: ON THE POEM BY MARIA STEPANOVA

The article offers an attempt to interpret Maria Stepanova’s poems I am a monument to you in this sonorous place… and I am a monument to myself in this sonorous place… (from the collection This-World [Tut-svet], 2001; the poems are numbered 1 and 2, and are therefore considered two parts of a single whole). The main areas of analysis are: the literary “genealogy” of the monument and the poetic contexts in Russian lyric poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, the genre specificity and subjective structure of the poems, the features of artistic language and the purpose of agrammatical constructions. Rooted in culture, the “non-man-made” monument, signifying poetic immortality, acquires spatiality in M. Stepanova, receiving a location in the empirical world (in “Botanical Garden”); thanks to this, a correlation with the contexts of cemetery elegies becomes possible, where the monument / tombstone is an appeal of the living to the dead and a “message” of the departed, addressed to the living. Subjective uncertainty, the “shimmering” and blurring of the boundaries of the “I” create a polyphonic effect; in the resonant matter of language, individual “replies” seem to forget about authorship in the general chorus. This is poetry that speaks for everyone and on behalf of everyone.