Igor Melamed’s poetic principle of indirect expression

The article studies the work of the modern poet Igor Melamed (1961–2014). Among the writers of his time, he stands out for his creative uniqueness and clarity of aesthetic and historical-cultural convictions. The corpus of Igor Melamed’s texts has been almost completely published by now, representing three separate editions. The purpose of this study is to consider the poet’s aesthetic position in terms of the methods of working with subtext and the principle of indirect expression of meaning. Working with a quotation fund is one of the difficult poetic techniques that is aesthetically convincing when implemented in Igor Melamed’s work, it differs from the technique used by his contemporaries in its complexity and versification daintiness. The article analyzes the poet’s poem, which is most indicative in this regard: “Snow clogs the darkness, oppresses vision...” (1987), containing a rather rare example of handling a classical (Pushkin’s) original source. The theoretical basis for this principle can be found in various traditions, it is widely used in ancient Indian poetry (vakrokti). The use of indirect expression is also found in other texts by Igor Melamed, but in the poem “Snow clogs the darkness, oppresses vision...”, the principle of vakrokti is the most fully implemented.