The article offers formal criteria of differentiating the military poetry of N. Gumilev from the opinion journalism poetry of G. Ivanov (collection «Fame Memorial»): communicative structure of the poem; the image of the speaker – the image of the rhetorician; tropes preferred; the system of metaphoric models and the ingenuity of their content; figures of speech; the degree of speech being clichéd, etc.
The article considers the issue of «futurism and war» in philosophical, cultural, aesthetic aspects. The analysis of the futuristic poetics confirms the fact that this phenomenon was historically determined in national and world culture.
The article explores the emotional and evaluative function of metaphor actualizing the military realia in the speech practices of French soldiers in the early twentieth century. The author shows that the use of metaphors in professional communication is largely conditioned by the current psychological and extra-linguistic context and by the connotative meaning of the linguistic sign as well.
