The principle of dialogue in poems by Mikhail Yasnov for children

Abstract

The article focuses on Mikhail Yasnov’s poetry that is addressed to children of different ages, from younger preschoolers to older schoolchildren. Yasnov’s poetry is viewed as a corpus of texts united by several general principles: among them are the harmony of childhood and the child’s trust in the world. Another unifying principle is poetic dialogue, manifested at different levels of literary texts: from characters and imagery to metatextuality and the author’s consciousness. Dialogue in this paper is understood as overcoming a single point of view, an attempt to go beyond the personal I motivated by the attention to the Other. Yasnov’s poetry focuses on the search for similarities and differences between the phenomena of reality as it presents many voices and life positions. The concept of dialogue has great moral potential in children’s poetry as it contributes to the formation of empathy and development of self-knowledge in children. The aesthetic value of dialogue lays in the enrichment of the thematic and figurative structure of the lyrics.

Keywords: Mikhail Yasnov, poetry for children, Russian poetry for children, poetic dialogue, metatextuality, intertextuality, animalism, family image