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Abstract: The paper studies the semantic organization of Mandelstam’s lyrics in projection onto the psychological patterns of speech production. The conceptual premise of the work focuses on the idea that Mandelstam's attention to poetic text genesis leads to the emergence in his poems of “traces” of inner speech programming, which manifest themselves at the pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic levels, systemically correlated with each other. Thus, in the pragmatic sphere, Mandelstam constructs the image of an ideal reader, who becomes the poet’s psychological alter ego. The focus on searching for the fundamental principles of creativity leads to the use of special semantic strategies for working with the text: Mandelstam’s lyrics demonstrate a tendency toward semantic agglutination, poetic errors, violations of lexico-grammatical grouping, and the dominance of semantics over syntax. The article reveals that these semantic strategies are based on the methods of unfolding and transition of inner speech into the external plane, which determine its specific structural-semantic features. Mandelstam uses the structural peculiarities of inner speech to solve purely aesthetic problems. In this sense, inner speech becomes the “poetic” substrate of some of the poet’s lyrical texts, where one can observe the paradigmatic and syntagmatic (contextual) development of figurative complexes that are based on mythological “matrices.” In Mandelstam’s work, the same inner speech situation generates multiple sound-semantic prototypes, leading to the formation of a series of figurative paradigms associated with each other. Inner speech becomes a principle that generates invariant poems dealing with a particular theme on the mythological, cultural, historical, and psychological levels. Thus, the study argues that the poetics of inner speech, being thematically related to the plot of the search for a word, in a number of poems also manifests itself at the structural-semantic level, determining the special semantic architectonics of individual poems. In this perspective, for Mandelstam, inner speech is not only a metapoetic construct associated with the “inner image of the poem”, but also a form-creating principle of poetic semantics.

About the author(s) :

Lyubov G. Kikhney

Moscow University named after A. S. Griboyedov (Moscow, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0342-7125

Olesya R. Temirshina

Russian State Social University (Moscow, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0127-6044

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 19.08.2025; date of publication: 31.10.2025

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