This paper demonstrates a unique perspective on time in lyrical poetry, highlighting its intricate discourse and redefining aspectual meanings.
One of the crucial onthological contradictions is that between time and eternity, with artistic literature undertaking systematic attempts at its reconciliation, which implies a significant sophistication of the internal structure of time. The best‑known example is intrigue in drama and narrative writing, where events tend to be united by cause‑effect relationships, and after the resolution of the action its entire development can be viewed as directed, in some sense or other, both forwards and backwards. The present paper seeks to show that a comparable, if different, phenomenon can be observed also in lyrical poetry. In the general case, the part of speech specialized for conveying non‑trivial aspectual meanings is the verb. However, in quite a few poems (ones written by Georgiy Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa), a non‑trivial aspectual structure must be assigned also to nouns, and this results in a kind of reduplication of time. Moreover, as the material under discussion suggests, this tends to happen in the foregrounded fragments of the text, hence, what we are facing here is an extremely unobvious and intricate grounding strategy appropriate to the lyrical genre.
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Геннадий Зельдович (2025) studied this question.
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