The Space of Certainty and Uncertainty in a Poetic Text (Based on the Poem “Violinist” by O. Mandelstam)

Abstract

The article discusses ways of organizing space in poetic text. Osip Mandelstam's poem “The Violinist” was chosen as the object of analysis. Various interpretations of the poem are considered, an original interpretation is proposed, the purpose of which was to answer the question of who is meant by the ‘fourth devil’. Relying on biographical, historical and cultural methods, using the methodology of the semiotic approach and intertextual analysis, the author proves that the architectonics of the poetic test is based on the principle of certainty-uncertainty, which serves as a balance between constants and variable structural units that allow a reader to offer an infinite number of assumptions, more or less close to the poet's intention, but never become the only one. It is possible because of variable units that the reader is included in the process of incrementing new meanings. Such a model is the key to the viability of poetic text.