“Counterpoint of a musician”: Intonation and dialogism in I. Chinnov’s poetry

Abstract

   The article researches the specificity of Igor Chinnov’s lyrical poetry and highlights its intonational dominant principle and dialogism. We study the way Chinnov skillfully combines semantic and rhythmical intonations within the framework of the same text, so that poetry is naturally born, as a fragment of spontaneous speech. In those rhymes, full of tragic element and reflections on the 20^th century discordant vicissitudes, Chinnov uses rhythmical shifts by intentionally destroying the melodic harmony of a regular meter. Chinnov’s desire to turn poetry into prose and his use of the natural speech intonation in such verses is compared with Russian concretists, who had to write poetry in the USSR in the second half of the 20^th century by using the language, which discredited itself being exploited by the totalitarian rule when it was used as a tool of manipulation of millions of people. These reflections result in the minimal use of tropes, the use of cliches and quotations, as well as the emphasis on the intonational expression in verse, which means an attempt to create a poetic text by using extralinguistic methods.