Publicistic aspects of the poem “Dream” by Gavriil Kamenev. Poetics serves rhetoric

Abstract

The article offers an analysis of Gavriil Kamenev’s poem “Dream”. The poem turns out to be a kind of a philosophic antiode: the author is consistently proving the vanity and fatality of a dream during the first fourteen stanzas and gives by contradiction his view of a positive ideal in the last one. The didactic nature of the poem causes the priority of rhetorical tasks both on compositional level (an amplification of the thesis given in the first stanza and a summary of the above said in 13th and 14th stanzas), and in the choice of the artistic means, most of which are rhetorical figures. Along with rhetorical means, poetic means are used: for example, the change of the object of speech causes the change of the genre and stylistic register, so Kamenev’s poem is not a plain verse publicism, but a not ordinary poetic case. The article also offers two conjectures making the meaning of the damaged during the first publication fragments clean.