Depicted time in Viktor Shirali’s “The age”

The article examines Victor Shirali’s poem “The Age” from the point of view of the functioning of the depicted time. The category of “the age” in the title is shown to be elaborated throughout the body of the text through a whole series of lexemes related to time. A system develops whose driving principle is the explicit lyrical voice. As a result, the entire text comprises a lyrical elaboration of the category of time inherent in the title - “age” in the meaning of “life.” Hence Shirali’s “The Age” is a text about time, in which time as a category of existence is revealed as a category of the text. Time is both an object and a way of presenting and comprehending the object by lyrical means. This is realized through the subject, who, feeling and showing himself in the present, nevertheless easily analyzes the past, presenting it in a time perspective relevant for himself, evaluating his personal age and the age of the poet in general, the poet as such, and looking into the future - into such a future, where there will be no end to life and age. The article uses the example of Shirali’s poem to prove the multidimensionality of the image of time in lyrics, the great temporal potential of this literary genus due to the wide possibilities of realization of the author’s ideas about time and the abundance of ways of this realization. And the category of age, placed in the title of the text, not only became the leading “theme”, but also became a kind of a common denominator for all the time categories in the poem, and as a result contributed to the realization of the author’s ideas about the world (as a beautiful century with no end) and about the poet’s place in it.