THINGS UNTIMELY: DEATH, BIRTH, AND POETRY IN EVGENII BARATYNSKY'S "NEDONOSOK"

Among Evgenii Baratynsky's lyric poems, "Nedonosok" ("The Stillborn," 1835) is known for being atypically cryptic. In what remains the most detailed study of the poem, Natalia Mazur calls it "one of Baratynsky's strangest and most interpretation-begging poems''. The author's aim in this article is to examine a set of literary factors behind the effect of strangeness produced by Baratynsky's "Nedonosok." Taken separately, every line and every stanza of the poem appears semantically clear; what causes us to perceive the text as a whole as being ambiguous or even enigmatic? What leaves the reader, post-reading, with a feeling that there must be more to what the poem says? In this study, the author explored the pockets of ambiguity that might be responsible for this effect: lexical ambiguity (what did the word nedonosok communicate to Baratynsky's contemporaries when used directly and figuratively?); generic ambiguity (what is it that signals that "Nedonosok" is not your canonical lyric poem?); and the pragmatic ambiguity related to the text's speech situation (who is speaking in "Nedonosok," and to whom?). The more ambiguous the text, the stronger our effort after meaning. In the past century and in more recent years, a succession of literary scholars has enriched our understanding of "Nedonosok" with their ideas of what the poem means. In her brief overview of these attempts, Mazur draws a distinction between intra- and intertextual reading strategies.