"Mirror" in S. V. Plakhutina’s poems "We Peered into the Dim Glass..." and "The Sticky Resin of a January Night...": Semantics and functions

Abstract

S. V. Plakhutina’s works are of great interest in the context of studying contemporary lyric poetry. The novelty of this investigation is determined by the lack of monographic literature on S. V. Plakhutina’s lyrics. Moreover, the existing critical reviews and research articles do not comprehensively describe the specific spatiotemporal organisation of her poetry. The relevance is due to the growing interest in the "mirror" theme in modern philology, in partic ular in lyric poetry, and the insufficient analysis of S. V. Plakhutina’s texts from the above-mentioned perspective. The article aims to perform a philological analysis of the poems "We Peered into the Dim Glass..." and "The Sticky Resin of a January Night...". To achieve this goal, the study examines the semantic features and functions of the mirror and the looking-glass world in the spatiotemporal structure of the poems. The research methods utilised in this study included semiotic, compositional, and intertextual analysis. The article concludes that the looking-glass world in the texts under examination becomes a model of the past with which S. V. Plakhutina’s lyric persona actively interacts. The structure analysis of the literary text reveals an antithesis between the own and the alien, the past and the present, the real and the illusory. The spatiotemporal organisation of the looking-glass world in which the lyric persona’s double appears creates the major contrast with the time and space real for the main lyric subject.