Gavrikov V.A., Izotov V.P. The experience of the classification of linguistic and speech “Ambiguities” in the poetry of Vladimir Vysotsky

Vladimir Vysotsky was a semi-forbidden poet. He did not publish a single poem in the USSR in his entire life, although he was probably the most popular person in the country. Every citizen of the Soviet Union knew the poet's songs, but the authorities tried to pretend that there was no such thing as “Vladimir Vysotsky”. On the one hand, the poet did not want to exacerbate difficult relations with the authorities; on the other hand, he strove to maintain an independent position, the freedom of his creativity. But Vysotsky could not express some thoughts directly. Therefore, the poet used various “encryption techniques”, hiding seditious meanings in subtext. Moreover, often it was a phonetic subtext that created interpretive ambiguity. The poet often used allegories, as he said in the song “The time for intros and preludes has passed…”. The authors of the article propose a classification of «ambiguities» in Vysotsky's poetry. These “ambiguities” are divided into two large groups: linguistic and speech. The first group is playing with homonyms, polysemy, clashing direct and figurative meanings, paronymy. The poet masterfully “adjusts” the context so as to actualize the twofold «decoding» of a word, a phrase, a poetic image. Speech “ambiguity” consists of playing with different types of homophones, as well as the possible placement of punctuation marks when interpolating song speech into graphics. Sometimes such “transcripts” have a seditious political overtones.

For citation: Gavrikov V.A., Izotov V.P. The experience of the classification of linguistic and speech “Ambiguities” in the poetry of Vladimir Vysotsky, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 1, pp. 16—27.

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