“The Internal Form of the Verse” and the Inner Word: Osip Mandelstam’s Conversation About Dante in the Psycholinguistic Perspective

Abstract

The object of the study is Mandelstam’s article Conversation about Dante, considered in a psycholinguistic perspective. The article puts forward a hypothesis that the problem of the genesis of a poetic text in Mandelstam’s metapoetics has its ontological justification in the idea of inner word. Such a connection can be explained by the fact that the literary text is considered by Mandelstam in its genetic dimension — from the standpoint of the generation of literary speech. Mandelstam’s focus on the genetic aspect of the birth of a word leads to regular intersections of the poet’s searches with the psychological concepts of inner speech. So, firstly, the inner image of the verse, which, according to Mandelstam, stands at the beginning of the poetic text, is typologically related to the inner word. Both phenomena are correlated with pre-text / pre-speech stage, have a double representation as image and the word, and are primarily manifested in the articulatorysyntactic code. Secondly, the principles of unfolding turn out to be common to the inner word and the artistic word, taken in its genetic aspect. Just as the “clot of personal meanings” (Vygotsky) in its deployment moves from the primary ‘synsemantic’ stage to verbal differentiation, so the “compositional clot” (Mandelstam), initially arising as a single semantic impulse, unfolds in the level space of the language. Thirdly, both the inner word and the artistic integrity postulated by Mandelstam exist in a special spatial modus, which is characterized by semantic simultaneity and the absolute dominance of semantics over syntax. Fourthly, the finished speech product is understood by Mandelstam both as a result and as a process, which, on the one hand, leads to the aesthetics of a draft, and on the other hand, matches Mandelstam’s ideas with the concepts of inner speech, where the remnants of the primary semantic syntax are found.