On literary imitations of two imperative poems by Joseph Brodsky

This article concentrates on the problem of literary interactions. It studies connections between Joseph Brodsky’s imperative poems “Ne vykhodi iz komnaty” (“Don’t leave your room”, 1970) and “Nazidanie” (“Cautionary Advice”, 1987), and their imitations. Those imitations were composed by both amateur and professional authors. The research objective is to define the character of similarities, the latter being mainly manifested at the rhythmic, speech and ideological levels. The methodology is based upon an empirical approach to the text; the specific methods are prosody analysis, comparative analysis, analysis of the motive structure. Two types of imitation of the said pre-texts are distinguished in the study. The first one is reflective feeble imitation represented by amateur texts written by web authors. Amateur poets create simplified variations of “Ne vykhodi iz komnaty” that became a “lockdown hymn” in the spring of 2020. Conscious support of a renowned poet’s work seems to legitimate creation of an amateur piece with its further placement on the web. The other type of imitation is a poetic dialogue. In spite of the fact that the author mainly employs “ready-made” compositional and speech patterns and lyrical and narrative motives, he develops and combines them in his own manner. M. Vatutina’s poem “S chuzhimi ne razgovarivai, zhizn’ u tebya odna…” (“Don’t talk to strangers, you’ve got just the only one life…”) may be viewed as a rhythmic and semantic paraphrase of Brodsky’s “Nazidanie” followed by definite transformations. Conceivably it cannot be referred to the so-called secondary texts in spite of its strong connection to Brodsky’s poems.