Interpretation of the lyric texts by the poets with diff erent cognitive styles

The article discusses the features of the reader’s interpretation of poetic texts by I. Annensky and N. Gumilev, the authors of which belong to different types of cognitive styles. The concept of cognitive style arose in psychology, but as a result of the term being transferred into the fi eld of cognitive poetics, it became necessary to describe its parameters in order to use it in the analysis of the poetic text. At the first stage of the study, it was necessary to find linguistic-stylistic analogues of the categories of the cognitive-style approach in psychology (field dependence / field independence, analyticity / syntheticity, intuitiveness / discursiveness, etc.).  These style parameters can be found in the conceptual nodes of the cognitive program generating the text (the image of the author, the image of the addressee, the pragmatic attitude, the method of translation of the author’s model of the world). At the second stage of the study, the task to be solved was to consider the features of the reader’s interpretation of poetic texts, whose authors belong to different types of cognitive styles. The texts of the poets I. Annensky, whose cognitive style is characterized by the parameter of syntheticity, and those by N. Gumilyov, who is characterized by analyticity, were chosen for comparison. The experiment data showed that modern students experience significant difficulties when interpreting synthetic literary texts. Intuitively, at the level of sensations and emotions, readers grasp the general meaning of the poem, but the associative chains of the text are restored in less than ten percent of the works. N. Gumilyov’s poem is a poetic declaration built on a rhetorical principle – based on a figure of contrast. The impact of Gumilyov’s text is the impact of aphoristic poetic thought, to which readers readily respond. The conclusion is drawn on the productivity of applying the term “cognitive style” to both the process of text generation and text perception.