Music and Time Annotation << Back The «Poetic Libretto» of Yuri Shaporin’s Symphony-Cantata «On the Kulikovo Field» Concerning Semantic Modulation of Alexander Blok’s Text Vorobyov I.S. The paper examines the mechanism of semantic modulation of the images of Alexander Blok’s poetic cycle «On the Kulikov Field» in the «poetic libretto» of Yuri Shaporin’s symphony-cantata bearing the same title, created in the period of the «first flourishing» of art of the Stalin era (the late 1930s and early 1940s). As a result of the specific rearrangement and editing of Blok’s poetic cycle made by Yuri Shaporin and Mikhail Lozinsky, Blok’s poetic manner was integrated into the totalitarian mythological system. Within its framework the symbolism of the poetry of the Russian Silver Age started to fulfill the functions of the totalitarian neo-religious symbolism. The narration of the «libretto» seemed to have passed from the sphere of a profoundly intimate, spiritual interpretation of the historical phenomenon, suggested by Alexander Blok, into a contemporary theatrical interpretation, in which the poetic word became the domain of the «characters» of the mythological subjects of Stalinist art: the Leader, the Hero, the Mother, the Betrothed who was waiting for her Hero, the people and the enemies. The outcome of this specific «estrangement» of the poetic text from its author was something which presented not the expression of a personal attitude towards an event but pictorial-epic depiction of the event itself through the prism of the mythological notions of the Stalin era. Keywords: Yuri Shaporin, Aleksandr Blok, «On the Kulikov Field», semantic modulation, totalitarian mythology Contacts: E-mail: izspbigorv@mail.ru Pp. 11-14.