Semantic development of precedent borrowing in poetry (case study of Rasul Gamzatov's eight-line poem)

The article attempts to update one of the relevant aspects of the practice of including precedent phenomena in the struc-ture of a literary text – the problem of harmonizing two genetically different text formations according to their cultural and connotational potential and the resulting creative and ethical responsibility of the author in relation to the source of borrowing. As an example of a successful solution to the above problem, we consider the eight-line poem by Rasul Gam-zatov, constructed through a compositional and thematic full-text development of the famous biblical saying “In the beginning was the Word” and expressing the poet’s pain and anxiety due to humanity’s inability to eradicate wars as the greatest and most tragic evil. An appeal to a source in the aura of a thousand-year-old cultural landmark, on the one hand, is a creative challenge and an ethical test for the artist of words, on the other hand, it opens up the possibility of a signif-icant expansion of the semantic and expressive potential of a work through the synthetic, mutually agreed-upon use of borrowed and the author’s own speech substance. The poem chosen as a sample amazes with its simplicity of form and extraordinary density of multi-leveled explicit and implicit meanings, the intensity and diversity of which are provided by the synthesis of three discursive types of speech – poetic, religious and journalistic. The article provides the author's interlinear translation of the poem, which reproduces the semantic structure of the original with a degree of adequacy sufficient for semantic-pragmatic analysis.