The Ballad of the Little Tugboat in the Context of Brodsky’s Poetry

Examined Brodsky’s first published poem, The Ballad of the Little Tugboat , in connection with other texts by the poet: Stanzas , Stanzas to the City , Poems in April , and some others. The introduction provides the history of the publication of The Ballad... ; the main part offers a detailed analysis of the poetics of the work. It is noted that Brodsky puts the genre definition of ‘ballad’ in the title of several more texts: The Ballad of Lermontov , Melancholic Ballad , Poems and Ballad from a Letter to E. Rein , Ballad with a Parcel . The source of most of these texts is the Maramzin’s Collection , the first self-publishing collection of Brodsky’s works, which contains unpublished texts by the poet. In addition, Brodsky’s ‘ballad’ texts are considered as part of the process of rethinking and overcoming the canons of the ballad genre in 20thcentury poetry. Comparing the Ballad of the Little Tugboat with the poe’s ‘adult’ poems allows it to be included in the circle of Brodsky’s metaphysical and ‘autobiographical’ poetry. An analysis of the image of the tugboat in Brodsky’s work allows us to conclude that the tugboat in the poet’s artistic world is an individual, free, romantic and at the same time stoic consciousness resisting the automatism of perception of life, whose choice is to swim ‘against the current’.