This article offers a specialized philological analysis of ornithological concepts and imagery in the poetic corpus of Mikhail Yeryomin (1936—2022), a classic figure of unofficial Soviet and contemporary Russian poetry. The proposed philornithological approach unfolds in two directions: the study of the syntagmatic range of bird imagery and the semantic aura (or halo) of the bird concept. This first part of the study presents the results of the syntagmatic range analysis, which concerns the positional characteristics of textual realizations of bird imagery — determined by their specific combinations with other figurative elements and by their structural position within the verse sequence, stanza, and the work as a whole. Patterns in the structural positioning of bird images within the poetic line and the text as a whole, their figurative proximity (for example, the relations Bird–Tree, Bird–Grain) and the underlying iconography of types and plots were identified. In the second part, the study of the syntagmatic range will be continued with an analysis of the iconology of the bird image in Yeryomin’s poetry, focusing on the specifics of the distribution and functional dynamics of the image — aspects shaped by the paradigmatic and polyscenario nature of the poet’s narrative thinking and by the overall mode of existence of his poems.
For citation: Gorelov O.S. Birds in the poetry of Mikhail Yeryomin: the syntagmatic range. Part 1, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2025, iss. 4, pp. 12—20.