• Russian Language and Literature
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• no.65
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• pp.85-108
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• 2019

This paper analyzes Iosif Brodsky's poems dedicated to the ruins. These poems have common themes and structures and we can call it Iosif Brodsky's ruin-text which can give some hints on poet's views on time and space. First, we define the meaning of Brodsky's post-apocalyptic chronotop "after our era" and show that it can be an alternative time and space where the Soviet concept of linear time constructed on the sacred belief in the human progress is rejected. In the subsequent analysis of the series of poems that make up the ruin-text of Brodsky, we will show that the ruins are a self-sufficient space in which time and language are fully realized. Finally, analyzing the quintessential text of Brodsky's time philosophy "Butterfly" in the intertextuality with Osip Mandelshtam's poem on butterfly, we can show that the small marginal creature becomes the very entelechy of time a la Aristotle. Butterfly, oscillating between the form and material of time, realizes the factura of time, its substance, which is the ultimate goal of Brodsky's poetry.