Equine Image in Tayana Tudegesheva’s Collection of Verses Sky Flight of Nine-Eyed Arrows: Semantic and Stylistic Analysis

As the matters of ethnic self-identity and cultural heritage of indigenous peoples grow in relevance, they trigger scientific interest to ethnic literature. This article focuses on the poetic image of a horse in the verses by the Shorian poet Tatyana Tudegesheva. This animalistic image is inherent to the culture of the Shors, a small numbered ingenious people from the south of the Kemerovo Region. Her second collection of Russian-language verses Sky Flight of Nine-Eyed Arrows (2007) focuses on the equine image, which appears in 15 from 110 poems across all five parts of the book. It accompanies the images of arrows and riders, which are typical of Tudegesheva’s idiostyle. According to the contextual stylistic analysis, the equine image contains the following explicit and implicit senses: destiny of the Shors and other Turkic peoples, war and death, nostalgy and memories of the past, love, creative writing, sense of life, human nature, family. A horse symbolizes power, will, rapid movement towards a set goal, and freedom. The equine image develops in various registers: as a part of historical heroic epos; as a psychological and autopsychological detail; as a philosophical reflection to nature, death, and time; as a mystical, magical, and mythological image.