Poetics of Semantics’ Broadening. Notes on O. Mandelstam’s Vocabulary

The article is dedicated to Osip Mandelstam’s poem “For the future ages’ resounding glory...” (1931). The research focuses on the features of Mandelstam’s poetical semantics, examined on the example of the word trus (coward). The article shows that under the influence of the poetic tradition Mandelstam puts together all the meanings of this word that had traditionally been separated, actualizes its etymology and religious context and engages in a conversation about Russian history with contemporary poets who also used the word trus in its original meaning, namely, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova and Maximilian Voloshin. The article also comments on images that make up the nearest poetical context of the word trus — “wolf” and of “bloody bones in the wheel”. The paper identifies the literary sources of these images among which are works by Charles de Coster, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius and Konstantin Sluchevsky. The study also speculates whether it is possible to translate polysemantic elements within a poem into foreign languages, as well as discusses the necessity of a “reverse translation” of the poetical text into the language of the epoch in which it was written by means of a linguistic commentary.