THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE LOGOS IN VALENTIN DYADKA’S ALBUM “PSYCHEDELIC TABLE SONGS”

Abstract

The article explores the phenomenon of the disintegrating logos, which, according to V. Feshchenko, becomes a key poetic process of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and its subsequent poetics, where the subject either fails to understand the language they speak or finds themselves bound by it. This process reflects either a striving toward the linguistic utopia of a proto-language – pre-semantic and universally comprehensible – or a critique of the totalizing logos that exposes the disintegration of the surrounding world. In poetic speech, the collapse of logos is embodied through the techniques of absurdity and grotesque, alogism and glossolalia, as well as in various forms of zaum (transrational) language. Similar poetic techniques are employed in constructing artistic expression by the contemporary Russian-speaking rapper Vyacheslav Mashnov, who performs under numerous heteronyms such as Gnoiny, Slava KPSS, and Valentin Dyadka, among others. This article analyzes the latter’s album Zastolnye Psikhodelicheskie Pesni (Psychedelic Table Songs), which cultivates a poetics of absurdity, wherein all logical and associative links in the lyrics are disrupted, resulting in semantic collapse. Particular attention is given to the grotesque, which juxtaposes the comic and the horrific, as well as to the function of zaum language within rap composition, which enables the lyrical subject to communicate an experience of existential dread to the listener.