“My sight, my strength, dims... by Arseny Tarkovsky in the feature film “Nostalghia: the ways of poetical quotation embedding in the cinematic text

The article reveals the ways of poetical quotation embedding in the cinematic text using the example of the poem My sight, my strength, dims... by Arseny Tarkovsky in the feature film Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky. The scene from Nostalghia which includes the poem My sight, my strength, dims... is analyzed from the points of view of the main factors of transformation of a poetic text when it is cited. These factors include: the place of the quotation in the structure of the cinematic text, mechanical transformations of the text, background information, the way of the quotation embedding, visual and sound accompaniment. The analysis shows that the episode when the poem is read is one the key scenes in the film. It reveals different characteristics of the concept of FATHER in the individual world-view of the film director. The main transformation of the text boils down to its translation into Italian. The quotation is embedded into the text via audio channel. As a result of the study we arrive to the following conclusions: 1) Poetic quotations in the film Nostalghia create numerous variants of the image of father interpretation. 2) The translated Italian text Si oscura la vista. La mia forza… preserves the main idea of the poem My sight, my strength, dims... and emphasizes the motives of the lost house and dying. 3) The embedding of the poem mentioned above into the cinematic text of Nostalghia is not plot-driven, unlike the integration of the text As a child I once fell ill. 4) The poetic texts As a child I once fell ill and My sight, my strength, dims... by Arseny Tarkovsky are united in the cinematic text of Nostalghia to create a binary system making the transition from the empirical level of the text to the sacred one.