Ways of representing the national world in contemporary Mari and Tatar poetry

The article is written within the framework of contextual poetics – a current trend of modern literary studies. It identifies aesthetically immanent factors of national identity in Mari and Tatar poetry based on the works of the modern Mari and Tatar poetesses S. Esaulova and Sh. Zigangirova, revealing characteristic features of the national mentality and features of the individual authorial worldview. The role of context in national literatures is clearly manifested by the specific socio-cultural space and the unique ethnoworld of a particular nation. This determined our interest in the context of the national world in fiction and the ways of its presentation in modern Mari and Tatar lyrical poetry. The study of contextual poetics, deciphering the national picture of the world, makes it possible to present its general/special features, the specificity of ethnocultures and creative individuals representing them. The concept of “the national image of the world” is especially relevant in the era of globalization in connection with the problems of ethnic and cultural communities’ self-identification. The methods of presenting contextual content are described in the article by such elements of contextual poetics as symbolic images, mythologemes, quotations, elements of the frame text, epigraphs, folklore intertextemes, etc. The main research method is the comparative one; in its implementation, historical-genetic, structural-semantic and contextual analysis of lyrical texts is of great importance. The empirical basis of the study is the poetic works of the Mari poet Svetlana Nikolaevna Esaulova (1958-2011) and the lyrical works of the Tatar poetess Shamsia Gatufovna Zhigangirova (1951). The subject of the study is the ways of representing the national world in modern Mari and Tatar poetry. The lyrical poetry of S. N. Esaulova and Sh. G. Zhigangirova has remained unexplored so far, the existing works are just the attempts to outline some of its features; the problems of contextual poetics, in particular, those of representing the national world based on the poetic works of Svetlana Esaulova and Shamsia Zhigangirova, have been presented in this article for the first time. This explains the relevance of our work.

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