The subject of the dissertation is the East-West opposition and the image of Japan in the works of Ezra Pound and David Burliuk, representatives of European/American Vorticism and Russian cubo-futurism respectively. The opposition is discussed in the cultural and historical context of the early twentieth-century Russian and European avant-garde esthetics with a focus on the typological similarities and radical differences between the two literary groups.

The primary material used in the analysis consists of little-studied Japan-related materials in the oeuvre of the two authors: Pound’s Noh-based dramatic works A Supper at the House of Mademoiselle Rachel and Tristan (1916, published in 1987), as well as his Japanese correspondence (published in 1987) and essays which appeared in Japanese periodicals (1939-1940), and, on the other hand, Burliuk’s prose narratives and poetry written during his stay in Japan in 1920-1922 (The Ascent to Fuji-san, Oshima, and In the Pacific Ocean, published in the USA in 1926-1927 and never reprinted, as well as verse collections Marusia-san and ½ Century published in the USA in 1925 and 1932 respectively).

The dissertation draws on Roman Jakobson’s dichotomy (outlined in “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”, 1954) of two opposite language modes, those of metaphor and metonymy, understood by the scholar in a broad sense as paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships structuring any semiotic system. In accordance with Jakobson’s view, the dissertation discusses the Vorticist and cubo-futurist esthetic assumptions, and the representation of the East/West opposition in particular, as examples of respectively metaphoric (based on analogy) and metonymic (based on contiguity) approaches.

The analysis of Pound’s and Burliuk’s Japan-related texts within the frame of Jakobson’s dichotomy allows foregrounding the essential difference between the Oriental projects of the two poets: while Pound builds a similarity-based East-West paradigm that challenges the familiar Western culture, Burliuk creates a contiguous background image of Japan, which legitimizes familiar cultural assumptions and essentially frames his dialogue with the West.