[H-CG20] International Comparison of Landscape Appreciation

[HCG20-11] Natural scenery and seasons in Russian Haiku

★Invited Papers

*Anastasia Petrova^1,2 (1.Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2.Russian State University for the Humanities)

Keywords:haiku, seasonal words, natural environment descriptions, landscape appreciation

A poetry form called haiku originated in Japan, but gained popularity also in many other countries, including Russia. Nowadays there are many poets who compose haiku in Russian: they constitute a vivid community, and their poems are an interesting phenomenon combining Russian literary traditons with Japanese style. Russian haiku, like any other poetry form, often describe the natural environment. How do these poems represent nature and how do they reflect poets’ appreciation for nature? Are there any common tendencies in describing environment? These are the questions which triggered this study. More than 14,000 haiku poems were examined to see their distribution within seasons and to find the words that can be called “seasonal words” (i.e. words the most frequently connected to specific seasons). Words related to landscape elements (such as ‘forest’, ‘garden’, ‘hill’, ‘river’, etc.) and atmospheric phenomena (such as ‘rain’, ‘snow’, etc,; celestial bodies such as ‘Moon’, ‘stars’, etc. are also included into this category) were also selected and analyzed to see what kind of nature they represent.