E-mail: korvic@list
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23, Gagarin av., Nizhnii Novgorod, 603022, Russian Federation
DSc in Philology, Professor, Nizhnii Novgorod State University named after N. I. Lobachevskii
This article examines the characteristics of the love chastushka form, drawing on several authoritative collections containing a total of over 15 000 texts recorded in the first half of the twentieth century. The chastushka has a limited poetic space but allows for the creation of artistically capacious works — an aspect of the genre’s poetics that has not attracted the attention of folklorists in all its complexity. The love chastushka’s “minimalism” is reflected in its small number of characters and fragmented content, depicting a typical episode in the history of a relationship and the specific situation of the characters. The immediacy of artistic time and narrow localization of the depicted material enhance this effect.
At the same time the genre’s artistic form allows for the expansion and deepening of its informational and emotional content. The plot, while maintaining stable character types, is open to expanding its range, allowing for a response to changing real-life circumstances. Given the chastushka’s compact form, the selection of facts to be depicted takes on particular importance. The poeticization of the everyday becomes an aesthetic factor, helping to reveal deep feelings and demonstrating their strength, beauty, and authenticity. The chastushka narrative allows for the use of discontinuities and omissions, which increases the artistic weight of the text and creates subtext, an opportunity to show feelings dynamically and ambiguously, and to present feelings in a complex manner — to reflect the complexity of the human spiritual world. Their two-part structure, in which the first part of the logical or formal parallelism is independent of the semantic couplet, leads to an expansion of the subject matter of the image. Each of these formative features merits further study
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