Verbal imagery in Grigory Petnikov’s poem “City. Charcoal drawing”

The article relies on the methodology of linguistic poetics and reveals the substantive-semantic and formal-semantic features of the poem by Grigory Nikolaevich Petnikov “City. Charcoal Drawing” (1924). The description of the language of the poem required an analysis of the deep mental-functional dependencies structuring the author’s worldview (“metatextual tropes (metatropes)”, as N. A. Fateeva defines them). It is shown how the means of lexical and tropeic designation and the means of syntactic expressiveness in this poem are used to implement the conceptual metatropes of hylozoism and synesthesia which are inherent in the idiostyle G. Petnikov. The poet’s lexical choice is analyzed in terms of the diversity of predicates denoting the properties, states and characteristics of the city as an animate agent. In addition, the paper describes language means of constructing the intermodal image of the city. It is concluded that, despite the absence of obvious semantic ambiguity or occasional word innovations in the text (which are characteristic of the early futuristic period of G. Petnikov’s work), in the poem “City. Charcoal Drawing” the poet continues to follow the key principles of Cubo-futurism. The futuristic principles of texture and expanded viewing are followed to textually embody the image of an industrial city as a self-aware, sensitive and vital matter.