Cold and frost in Joseph Brodsky's poetry

The author analyzes the motifs of cold and frost in Joseph Brodsky’s liryc poetry. The research shows that these motifs are traditionally associated with negative connotations, hypothetically originating from Robert Frost’s lyrics, but revisualized by Brodsky in the light of existentialism. In hid artistic worldview, cold is related not only to a decay of feelings and images of death, it also deprives the poet of his identity, correlating to life understood as the life of a poet or wordsmith. There are several exclusions, mostly in Brodsky’s early lyrics (‘Chistmas Romance’ and partly ‘Almost An Elegy’). Nevertheless, Brodsky employs the motifs of cold and frost to express a melancholic attitude to the world where an individual is opressed. In order to deal with the challenges to comment upon semantically and functionally different examples, the author suggest taking a few typical texts and try to find in them the essence of the metaphor as a poetic equivalent of the deepest thoughts and emotions. The analysis reveals the likeness of Frost to Time, this being one of the major topoi of the Nobel winner which allows Brodsky to highlight the emotionality and subjectivity within the existential values as opposed to the objectivity and unruffledness of the outer world in its relation to an individual.