Poetics of the cycle “Parting With a Friend” by Cao Zhi

The article is devoted to a comprehensive review of an Early Medieval Chinese poetic cycle, consisting of two friendly messages preceded by a preface, - the “Parting With a Friend” by Cao Zhi (192-232). The article is the first to provide an interlinear translation and a sequential analysis of the cycle. In progress of the analysis the images, tropes and figures in both poems, the motives, different types of connection between the motives, the themes of the poems, their compositional structures, genre identity, and the peculiarities of the poetics of the “Parting With a Friend” as a cycle were examined in detail. By the example of the “Parting With a Friend”, conclusions regarding the appearance of a poetic cycle in Chinese literature at the turn of Antiquity and the Middle Ages were drawn. The poetics of the “Parting With a Friend” was examined on the base of the Western theoretical material, which makes our study not purely synological, but partly comparative.