Future tense in Pushkin’s lyrics as a subject for analysis at school

Abstract

The philological analysis in the article centres on the poetics of artistic time in A. S. Pushkin’s lyrics. Special attention is given to the future tense in its connection with the present tense. The research relied on the methods of literary text analysis and didactic material selection for the works under examination. The focus is on the lyrical poems schoolchildren study mainly in the ninth year. Thematically, they are grouped as follows: 1) freedom as an ideal strived for, loyalty to the ideal; 2) harmonious interpersonal relationships; 3) human destiny and its stages; 4) the inexorable passage of time: death, generational change, immortality. The methodological part of the article includes tasks of the following types: 1) assignments related to generalisation based on identifying symbolic images and analysing the composition of a large body of lyrical texts belonging to different thematic groups; 2) linguistic-stylistic tasks that update students’ knowledge of lexicology (analysis of epithets and Old Church Slavicisms), morphology (the use of parts of speech in grammatical forms due to changes in the lyrical text content), and syntax (the functions of a conjunction in a complex sentence); 3) a speech development assignment based on the verbal drawing technique, which enhances year-nine pupils’ creative thinking and imagination. Assignments and questions are aimed at developing figurative thinking in schoolchildren, their skills of lexical, morphological, syntactic analysis of text, as well as pupils’ skills of identifying the artistic functions of linguistic and speech features of a literary work.