Methodological approaches to interpreting the metaphorical system in Russian Silver Age Poetry and Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Abstract

The article develops a comprehensive methodological approach to interpreting the metaphorical system in Russian Silver Age poetry and in contemporary Chinese poetry, in which metaphor is treated as a cognitive and sociocultural mechanism for constructing reality rather than an isolated stylistic trope; the aim is to ensure the methodological commensurability of comparisons across heterogeneous poetic worlds and to avoid de- ontologisation and contextual distortions when juxtaposing the images and functions of metaphor within differing cultural-historical coordinates. The empirical basis is a representative corpus of texts by Russian symbolists, acmeists, and futurists (A. Blok, A. Bely, V. Ivanov; A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, N. Gumilev; V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov) and by China's Misty Poets and their successors (Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, and others), reflecting a spectrum from post-revolutionary existential reflection to urban and globalisation-related concerns. The methodology combines comparative-historical analysis to identify typological convergences and divergences; hermeneutic reconstruction of the fusion of horizons of meaning; semiotic analysis of poetry as a secondary modelling system; a cognitive-linguistic account of metaphor as a conceptual mapping of experience; and sociological elucidation of its functions within the dynamics of cultural communication. The results demonstrate a contrast in the ontological grounds of metaphor: the vertical metaphysical and theurgical orientation of the Silver Age, directed towards transcendence and the transfiguration of being, versus the horizontal immanent, existential-social, and critical orientation of contemporary Chinese poetry, which registers the rupture between official discourse and the subject's experience. Hermeneutic analysis of key metaphorical fields (city, nature/landscape, lyrical I) reveals divergent models of subjectivation and spatio-temporal imagery: from a mystically organised Petersburg and a prophetic subject to a megapolis of alienation and the little person as bearer of historical trauma. A functional cross-section shows a shift from elite esoteric communication and alternative cognition to democratising critique and the reconfiguration of individual/collective identity. The proposed three-level model (ontological, hermeneutic, functional) provides an operationalisable framework for comparative poetics and translation studies, clarifies the methodological limits of the transferability of analytical tools, and opens prospects for further integration of corpus-based and cognitive-semiotic procedures in the cross-cultural analysis of poetic metaphor.