SEMANTIC IMPLICATIONS OF CHINESE LOVE POETRY: A CASE OF PALACE-STYLE POETRY (GONGTISHI)

Abstract

Th e article made the fi rst attempt for the Russian scholarship of analyzing Palace-style Poetry as a special phenomenon of Chinese lyric poetry and spiritual culture of the fi rst half of VI AD.Th e author tries to explain the defi ning features of Chinese love poetry, peculiarities of the traditionalist views on it deriving from the Confucian theories and ideological and artistic features of gongtishi. Th e upper layer of the semantic of such verses is the praising of court beauties and their life in magnifi cent palace chambers, which comes from poet’s ideas that the “true poetry” must deliver aesthetic delight of female attractiveness. However, there are some reasons to suggest its Taoist and Buddhist meanings. In the fi rst case, the gongtishi poems are imitating an adept’s meeting with goddesses; in the second they could have expressed implicitly diff erent Buddhist concepts going from views of illusory nature of all being up to refusal of carnal desires. Th is semantic complicity allows suggest the Palace-style Poetry to be a daring creative experiment, undertaken to prove the richest creative opportunities of Chinese love poetry.

Keywords:

China, Southern and Northern Dynasties, Chinese poetry, poems on amour themes, Palace-style Poetry, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism