Tropes in the poems of Feofan Prokopovich: metonymy and synecdoche

The main aim of the study was to analyze trope contexts selected from the poetic heritage of Feofan Prokopovich, one of the main reformers of Russian literature in the Peter the Great’s era, in terms of consistency between his poetic practice and rhetorical theory presented in the treatise “De arte rhetorica libri X”. The material under study comprised metonymy and synecdoche used by Feofan Prokopovich in 24 of his poems included in the academic collection of his works. The research methods included the functional-descriptive, lexicographic, contextual, comparative analyses which served as the main procedural research devices. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that there is a fairly high activity of metonymic transfers in the poems of Feofan Prokopovich, who made a significant contribution to the development of Russian poetic phraseology, which has remained underestimated for a long time. The transformation of the original meaning is often carried out according to the principle of associative approximation of a place and its inhabitants, a part and the whole, the single and the multiple, an abstract property and its concrete manifestation, which is typical for conventional metonymy and synecdoche. Prokopovich uses transfers by contiguity, which were characteristic of biblical and chronicle sources (horn strength, shield protection), as well as metonymic periphrases, hypallages (displaced or metonymic epithets) that personalize him as an author, and symbolization based on the contiguity of a mythonym and an abstract concept (Mars war, Apollo art). The findings form the basis for the further study of the poetic practices of poets of the Petrine and post-Petrine eras, who had a significant influence on the formation of the poetics of Russian Baroque (pre-classicism) and classicism. The findings can also be used for advancing research into the diachronic rhetoric of Russian lyric poetry as a system of tropes and figures of speech used by poets in the process of realizing their artistic concepts.