The native city history as a macro plot of B. Shakhovsky’s cycle of “Poems about Astrakhan”

The research object are constant elements of urban space in B. Shakhovsky’s cycle “Poems about Astrakhan”. The article studies the main hallmarks of Astrakhan text, which form the plot of a super-genre unity. The key images and motifs of cycle not only reflect the topography of the capital of the Caspian Sea, its biogeographic, cultural features and architectural appearance, but also reveal the semiotic potential of the city, combining two types of chronotope - water / river and desert. Folk legends and ideas about Astrakhan as a border space form the macro plot. Historical metamorphoses, defining changes in the image of the poet's native land in the context of destructive and creative Soviet mythology, play a special role in the dynamics of the lyrical narrative. The motif of the path performs a structure-forming function in the text of B. Shakhovsky. The architectonics of the text is governed by the principle of juxtaposition of two time layers - past and present. Change of subjects of speech in the poems of the cycle, movement from neutral to “I”- and “we”-narrative is stipulated by conjugation of two storylines: historical and biographical. The research methodology involves a combination of semiotic and structural approaches to the test, methods of motivic, intertextual and mythopoetic analysis.