A semantic cluster in the poetics of Osip Mandelstam

The article describes the use of “semantic cluster” concept in fiction, including the analysis of poetry of the twentieth century. The author's focus is on the poetics of O. Mandelstam, considered from this aspect. In Mandelstam's semantic poetics, clusters represent deep semantic structures conceptualizing the poet's intentions in the broad associative context of culture. Most of the semantic clusters used by Mandelstam are triads (ternary constructions) filled with exceptional ambiguity and inconsistency. In the background there is textual fabric, characterized by bilateralism and oxymoron, i.e. consisting of binary oppositions, which contains insoluble dramatism and cognitive dissonance. Creatively filling poetic clusters with cultural and philosophical meaning, Mandelstam sought to convey the complexity of the contemporary moral, social and political world order by the very poetics of his work. To do this, he combined in the texture of his works binary and ternary structures, usually incompatible. If binary structures accentuate the problem of choice between two extremes, the ternary structures lead the reader into the field of semantic uncertainty. This allowed Mandelstam to give his poetic world a special tragedy that conveyed the atmosphere of the Stalin era and the great Terror.