The Medial Function of Contemporary Poetry (The Poem by E. Si- monova “In Nice”)

The article is based on the hypothesis that contemporary poetry performs the function of a mediator within a fragmented society. The poetic text, in addition to its existence in a book format, is realized in a variety of media contexts, interacting with different types of art, as well as penetrating both public and personal communication. At the same time, the poetic form can change itself, losing the customary formal features, but retaining the generic (lyrical) essence. The processes of “other existence” of a poetic text are heterogeneous and large-scale; in this article the thesis about the medial function of contemporary poetry is illustrated on the material of one specially chosen text – the poem “In Nice” by E. Simonova. Simonova’s free verses from the book “Her Two Only Dresses” (2020) fit not only into women’s poetry, but also into the so-called “docupoetry”. At the same time, Simonova’s poetry is distinguished by the desire to overcome antagonisms and unite the seemingly incompatible. The example of the poem “In Nice” proves the significance for Simonova of the classical poetic tradition, which, however, is subject to inversion. On the composition level, Pushkin’s elegy “When I wander outside the city thoughtfully ...” is used as a pretext. The name of Georgy Adamovich framing the text actualizes the acmeist tradition and the memory of the poetry of the “Parisian note”, with the key themes of death, exile, and Russia. At the same time, the tradition is refracted paradoxically in Simonova’s text: self-irony is dissonant with the elegiac modus, the sacred (Easter) becomes mundane, the dead are perceived as alive, and the poetic word becomes a guarantee of eternal life. But with all the paradoxes and inversions, Simonova’s poem expresses a harmonious image of the world and the poet. Simonova’s creative work demonstrates a special socio-cultural function of contemporary poetry: to act as a mediator between culture and everyday life, classics and “post-poetry”, spoken word and book tradition, verse and prose, and poet and reader. Performing a communicative function, the poet, however, does not completely merge with any of the socio-cultural “loci”, revealing the features of tricksterism and, at the same time, internal disharmony. The harmony of paradoxes does not lead to the stati