"“A s Zapada Padaet Krasny Sneg Sochnymi Kloch’yami Chelovech’ego Myasa...”. The Image of War in the Early Works of Vladimir Mayakovsky "

The article contains a linguistic and stylistic analysis of two poems
by V. V. Mayakovsky, representing the author’s poetic reaction to the beginning of the First World War — “The War is Declared” and “Mother and
the Evening Killed by the Germans” (1914). These works have several features in common, including the ring structure, word and sound repetitions,
wordplay, neologisms, epithets, similar techniques of personifi cation, metaphorization, contrast, deconstruction of idioms and nonce words coined
by Mayakovsky. The idea of the horrors of war is conveyed by the author
through the words that create semantic fi elds “Death”, “Murder” and “Ugliness” in the literary text, as well as through the actualization of sound and
color semantics. To visualize the image of death white, black, red, yellow
and blue colors are used with the predominance of red shades (crimson, red,
burning, etc.). Red is also associated with images of deformity, injury and
suffering cripples (draw blood, tattered, scraps of human meat, mangled,
stump, break fi ngers, legless, armless, killed, etc.). Sound associations are
created by incorporating lexemes semantics of which represents a whole
range of auditory signals from silent whisper of a dying man to a raging
scream of a victim (to mumble, to beg, to cry, to burst into tears, to clink,
to сlatter, a ring, to shout, to scream, savage scream, rumbling voice, bass,
rumbling, straining, etc.) in the verbal fabric of the text. In the background
of these semantic fi elds temporal and spatial images (evening, new moon,
Russia — West) are activated, bearing a symbolic character.