Features of the conceptual structure of Osip Mandelstam's poetic texts in poems of different years

The topicality of the research is determined by the lack of knowledge about Mandelstam's poetic worldview in the dynamic of his writing. The analysis of the author's conceptual structure of poetic texts allows us to expand understanding of the poet's sphere of concepts and means of its verbalization in his early and late lyrics, and provides a possibility to identify features of its realization in poems of different years. Mandelstam's poetic texts included in the collection Stone (1913) and lyrics written in the period from 1930 to 1937 (138 works) are the material of the research. The key concepts are life, death, St. Petersburg, the way and music, which are ideologically significant in the author's works and display the author's individual features. The research is carried out taking into account the typology of conceptual structures developed in the communicative stylistics of the text. The results of the analysis show that Mandelstam's conceptual structure of texts transforms in terms of the number of key concepts actualized within a single text (in the early works one-term conceptual structures dominate; in the late works two- and three-term ones). The content of the concepts also changes. This shows, for example, in the features of the music concept: in Mandelstam's early lyrics music is interpreted as life, while the late ones express the idea that the existence of any sound can lead to death. The nature of relations between key concepts within a single poetic text changes: in contrast to early lyrics, late works are characterized by bright and repeatedly updated relations of contrast between the key concepts. This feature can be explained by a change in the literary direction in which the author was working (the transition from symbolism to Acmeism), a change of emotional tonality of the texts, their semantic and ideological content. The transformation also involves such a feature of the conceptual structure as the presence or absence of direct nominations of concepts in the lexical structure of poetic texts: in the author's early lyrics the analyzed concepts are actualized clearly, and in the late ones indirectly. Thus, conceptual structures of explicit type are represented widely in the early works and of implicit type in the late works. In my opinion, the changes in Mandelstam's poetic worldview and in the conceptual structure of his poems were influenced by such extralinguistic factors as peculiarities of the poet's biography, the change of his literary method, the influence of the political and social situation in the country. The research proves the evolution of the conceptual structure of Mandelstam's poetic texts and determines its evolutional features, distinctive for his lyrics of different years. The results of the research are interesting for cognitive linguistics and communicative stylistics of the text, and can be used in university and school classes on stylistics and philological analysis of the text.

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