lyric

The article attemps to sum up the results of the national theoretical reflection on the nature of the lyric. The author considers the question whether such characteristics as enhanced emotionality, musical sense, subjectivity, ingenuousness, traditionally attributed to the lyric, are its specific features.

In the article the motive of the music of the moon in K. D. Balmont’s poetry is researched on the material of his poems, prose and aesthetic articles. Its symbolic value and evolution in books of the early, mature and late periods are explored. The following conclusions are drawn. In the early lyric poetry of Balmont the moon is associated with the oxymoronic motive of the ‘sounding silence’.