LOUIS ARAGON’S ESSAY “RHYME IN 1940”: FROM THE HISTORY OF VERSE TO THE DISCOURSE OF CONTRABAND INFLUENCE

The article analyses the verbal strategies of Louis Aragon, an active participant of the Resistance movement, who made a significant contribution to the liberation of France and contributed to the approach of peace, in his essay “Rhyme in 1940”, which is an example of the close relationship between poetic and political attitudes. The transformation of Aragon’s versioning and stylistics after 1927 is analysed (cultural transfer factors in contact with Russian and Soviet poetry: joining the Communist Party, marriage to Elsa Triolet, ‘ear training’ by listening to accen tual-syllabic poetry). The controversy surrounding the use of rhyme in Aragon’s poems has not been covered in our country. The article presents the arguments of Aragon’s opponents (G. Ribemont-Dessaignes, B. Peret). The poetics of Louis Ara gon’s essay “Rhyme in 1940”, included as a preface in his poetry collection Knife in the Heart (Crève-cœur, 1941), which was a response to critical rhetoric, is for the first time comprehensively examined in connection with the historical and artistic con text. The article analyses Aragon’s ways of arguing for the use of rhyme and expand ing rhyme strategies, drawing on quotations from Mallarmé, Verlaine, Apollinaire, songs, and examples from his own poems. Aragon uses different types of circumlo cution, which helped to avoid censorship: metaphors and allusions (discourse of contraband influence). Seeing the unity of the literary process as inextricably linked to the political context, Aragon elevates broken rhyme to the enjambement used by Hugo in his drama Hernani directed against royal arbitrariness. Aragon, speaking of rhyme, uses metaphors related to health (illness, healing), presenting rhyme as a kind of living. The return to the mnemotechniques (national system of versification), with the expansion of the possibilities of rhyme, ensured that texts quickly entered the collective memory when poems were passed from mouth to mouth at a time when print publications were difficult. Aragon’s work is well studied in our country, but the essay on rhyme has not been translated because the abundance of poetic quota tions and the argumentation associated with the specificity of their sound organisa tion makes translation difficult.