Tower of Babel: From Symbol to Language Methods (‘Gorgorod’ by
Oxxxymiron)

The article deals with the concept rap album Gorgorod by
Oxxxymiron (a nickname of the Russian rap musician and poet Miron Fyodorov). The narrative describes a biography of a poet Mark who had avoided to
participate in the political life of his city with the fictional name Gorgorod but
later decided to join the resistance movement after his meetings with other characters – Alice and the Guru, the leader of the opposition. The rebellion failed
but the mayor of Gorgorod let him go. Later, Mark was murdered by an unknown person; his poem “Where we are not” became his final text talking about
the fictional world (probably, the Celestial City of new Jerusalem).

The research in the paper relies on the hip-hop studies and the analysis of the
multilingual code and anagrammatism by Prof. Maria Dmitrovskaya. This approach allows to decipher the implicit levels of the semantics and to demonstrate how the text is organized by the language methods applied by the author.

The key image in the text determining the author’s philosophy is a Tower of
Babel (the cover of the album reproduces the little version of the ‘Tower of Babel’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder). The myth of Babylon refers to such mythological motives as viciousness and pride. The research of the Babylonian pretext
makes it possible to reveal the language method of the author: Oxxxymiron uses
various styles and languages creating the effect of the polyphony reflecting the
drama of the unsuccessful construction of the tower in Babylon. Among such
means one can find the homonymy and homophony in different languages
(favela vs favella), logical errors (identified only by the decoding of the multilingual code, for instance: ‘plutocracy is intertwined with power’ while the
Greek kratos means ‘power’), usage of metaphoric equivalents of the key notions. The analysis of these multilingual codes reveals the layer of the Bible
pretext of the Gorgorod.

The paper considers both explicit and implicit presence of the tower’s image
in the text. The tower is a combination of a vertical and a circumference, openness and closure. The semantic complexes are distributed throughout the text in
each track (there are such words representing the “circle” lexemes as Russian
krug, Latin globus and circus, French arrondissement, ancient Greek κύκλος etc.; the same principle is realized in cases of “vertical” and other lexemes). The
author argues that this method of the text construction manifests the mythopoetic thinking immanent to Oxxxymiron. A typical feature of this thinking is the
organization of mutual transitions of the microcosm and the macrocosm, which
can also be shown by the example of the writers’ selection of lexemes. The semantic complexes of fate, home, interweaving, significant for Oxxxymiron, are
supported in the text both by lexical means and by anagramming. Thus, the image of the Tower of Babel symbolizes the search for harmony as well as its failure.

The paper also argues that the name of the protagonist is of great importance: Mark comes from the Latin ‘hammer’. This image is also embedded into
the text (Russian balda ‘hammer’ etc.). The article further demonstrates the potential of the image of Mark the Evangelist as a prototype of the protagonist of
the Gorgorod, as well as the parallels between Venice, whose patron was Mark
the Evangelist, and the place “Where we are not”. Besides, the multilingual
analysis shows the significance of other lexemes and motives connected with
the Mark’s name (border; darkness; water; happiness and death). This approach
mobilizes anagrams of Mark’s name in different languages (ancient Greek
μάκαρ, μακάριος; medieval Latin marca; English mark; Russian MoKRoe,
MoRoK, MRAK etc.). All of them support the same semantic complexes of border, death and fate.

The last part of the research refers to Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorso o Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua (ca. 1524). There is a reason to suppose that
some motives of this work (the disintegration of a common language and the
perspective of its re-creation) are reproduced in the Gorgorod. The paper reconstructs also some intertextual relationships between writings by Machiavelli and Oxxxymiron.
Finally, the author argues that Oxxxymiron represents the Babylonian story
as a case for his reflection on the nature of language and one of politics. Thus,
the text of the Gorgorod is an example of a poet’s masterly work with a language.