Image of snow in the poetry by Tatiana Nikolaeva: semantic and stylistic analysis

Contextual senses of a word with a landscape semantics reflect an individual world picture of the author. The word snow has a rich and diverse semantics in Russian poetry. The purpose of the article is to consider semantic and stylistic features of the image of snow in the poetry by a contemporary poet Tatiana Nikolaeva (1956–2021) based on analyzing lexical structure of a poetic text. Semantic and stylistic analysis is based on ideas of M.N. Kozhina (the concept of imaginative literary concretization) and N. S. Bolotnova (the concept of lexical structure of a poetic text). Description of textual syntagmatics and paradigmatics considers expressive means representing different levels, although the lexical level is recognized as the main one. Associative and verbal network of the text is studied in accordance with the author’s idea and the reader’s reception patterns. Each associative direction, as a contextual “group of associations with a common strategy” (A. P. Klimenko), creates a specific aspect of the image. Verses and poems of T.N. Nikolaeva’s first collection Where are you, the descendant of The First?..: The drama of love (2004) are material for semantic and stylistic analysis. The authors of the article selected 11 (from total 83) texts containing lexical representants of the image of snow, which were analyzed regarding their contextual syntagmatic and paradigmatic connections. In T. Nikolaeva’s poetry, snow is more a reflection of the heroine’s internal world than a landscape detail. Snow is not only a part of winter nature, but also of summer pictures and nature between seasons. There are three main aspects in associative and semantic development of the image of snow. They are united through the principle of gradation typical for T. Nikolaeva’s poetics. A dominating associative complex "snow element" includes the image of an intensive snowfall with chaotic nature tied to a symbolic topic of a lost way; this image also reflects expressive topics of passion and lost love. The second aspect of the image of snow is "snow nothingness", the cold of loss and emptiness. While in the first case various expressive means are emphasizing dynamic character of the image, in this case the central image is statics, absence of life. The third aspect of the image of snow is "divine snow": spiritual senses, a way to the higher light. Thus, the “snow triad” of T. Nikolaeva relates to her poetics of gradation and Christian worldview, in which a human is going through passions to God.