White colour symbolism in the poem "A Cemetery near Paris" by R. Rozhdestvensky: a linguoculturological aspect

Robert Rozhdestvensky lived in the era of scientific atheist propaganda. Nevertheless, his poem "A Cemetery near Paris" is an artistic experience of understanding a civil war as the evangelical sin of fratricide. The article aims to analyse the poetic text from a linguoculturological perspective. The study used historical-genetic, descriptive methods as well as the method of observation of the stylistic functions of linguistic units in conjunction with narrative, semantic, componential, and linguo-stylistic analysis. We examined the words and set phrases that act as the main object of this study. Using them, the poet conveys the semantic shades of white and creates the contextual background necessary for their contrastive perception. The adjective white is the dominant lexical means representing the white colour semantics in the poem by R. Rozhdestvensky. Its different grammatical forms repeatedly occur in the text. The expressive effect in the perception of the work is achieved primarily through a natural combination of two main usual lexico-semantic variants (LSV) of the keyword with the contextual semantic connotations ‘colour of the shroud’, ‘colour of the robes of angels, saints’. In addition, such an effect is also created by actualising the themes of death and holiness which are conceptually significant for the Russian mental linguistic consciousness. These interrelated concepts are associated with the colour white. The linguoculturological significance of the dominating lexical unit white and its shades of meaning in the text is enhanced with the help of the same root adverb dobela (English until it is spotlessly clean). Other means include associatively related designations birch, clouds, candles as well as words and expressions thematically interacting with the lexeme white. We conclude that the semantics of the colour white in the poem "A Cemetery near Paris" performs text-forming and semantic functions since it creates a general elegiac tone of the work and considerably helps to objectively evaluate the message of the poet and how it is artistically conveyed in the text.

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