“Being... is in fact nothing”: Genre-semantic accents in I. Brodsky’s great poem “Butterfly”

The paper analyzes Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Butterfly” (1972), which has not been previously investigated in detail by philologists, and considers a number of its images and motifs that cause discrepancies in critics’ interpretations. The research is undertaken in order to comprehend the role and functions of the butterfly image in shaping the poetic world of Brodsky’s poem and to outline its multi-vector interpretation. The paper examines and rethinks the usual connotations of the butterfly motif image (life/death, soul, spirit, lightness of being, carelessness of existence, etc.) and identifies new components of a fairly traditional poetic image. The research is novel in that it is the first to provide a deep and detailed analysis of the system of motifs and images in the poem “Butterfly”, to offer explanations for some obscurities in the poem that have caused significant difficulties and variations of meaning among critics, to reveal the nature of the embodiment of various thematic layers in the poem. As a result, it is proved that the impulse of the persona’s philosophical mood and the poetic world of Brodsky’s “Butterfly” as a whole is accounted for by an alternative interpretation and understanding of the butterfly image, endowing it with unique, Brodsky-specific connotations that form a dominant parallel between the poet and the butterfly.