“The space flowed freely.”: towards the problem of the spatial organization of the event in lyrics (the poem by Victor Shirali “Sittingjust across me in the metro train.”)

The article examines some features of the spatial organization of the lyrical event in the poem by the St. Petersburg poet Victor Shirali (1945-2018) “Sitting just across me in the metro train...”. This poem, created in 1972, belongs to the early lyrics of Shirali and is characterized by an extremely interesting correlation of an external event (a woman's face accidentally seen), and a lyrical event (the subject's reflection of what happened) in the space of a subway car. In the article, a particularly close attention is paid to two verses located closer to the end of the poem: “The space flowed freely // Through our reflections in the glass”. These lines are considered as an explication of a micro-event that combines, on the one hand, a plot event, “incident”, “chance”; on the other hand, an event of reflection on this occasion, that is, what is usually considered a lyrical event. That is, in Shirali's poem, the result is an event in which the “incident” is not a reason for it, but an important part of it. The lyrical event is a sign of an important qualitative change in the subject, who has seen, albeit vaguely, the disembodied essence of himself. In order to go through that experience, a person had to be in a state of passive complacency, contributing to the contemplation of the world and himself in this world. In the aforementioned synthetic event of the fluidity of space through reflections, the subject of action is this space itself, while the lyrical subject acts both as an object and as an observer located in this space. Thus, the article proves that the spatial organization of an event in the lyrics can also be the event itself, and it is a lyrical event that forms the lyrical plot.