Special aspects of understanding oxymoron in the world of Vasyl Stus’s poetry

Abstract

We propose to take a look at our article through the prism of the infinite variability of the semantic spectrum of the poetic word. Out of the entire real artistic process of word functioning in the V. Stus’s poetic world, our interest lies in the nature and mechanisms of semantic changes occurring during the creation of oxymoronic images. The article is focused on the semantic analysis of oxymoronic compounds in the interaction of linguistic and extralinguistic contents. Each word has an infinite number of faces, but the author gives prominence to the one that most adequately reflects his interpretation of an object through images associated with a word, and through that word with a certain object or phenomenon that it names. Therefore, special conditions of word functioning created by a poetic text form complex associative and imaginative connections and are one of the most important principles of highlighting the most important (from the author's point of view) information. Peculiarities of poetic thinking, existential worldview and tragedy of feelings influenced greatly the way Vasyl Stus’s poems sound and added vivid oxymoronicity to them. Oxymoronicity is a difficult journey from worldview conflicts, internal disharmony, complexity and unconventional perception of the world, or even peculiarities of temperament, to the reflection of all these internal conflicts in artistic images. The understanding of the world, man, time and space, and the problems of existence is not encoded in oxymorons, but acquires a clear expressive description through them. Oxymoronic compounds present the author’s moods, emotions, views in all their width. The more peculiar the writer’s style, the more nuanced the possibilities of combining words; the imaginative and semantic specificity of the language is used almost to its fullest. The more original and even paradoxical the combination of lexical units within the oxymoron, the higher the artistic and aesthetic tension of a poem. Therefore, we associate the semantics of oxymoronic combinations with the features of the poet’s tragic worldview, as well as with the peculiarities of the artist’s poetics that are not typical for Ukrainian literature: tendency to use condensed and concentrated images, to reflect the emotional energy of a fact, object, phenomenon in the poetic word, to search for new shades of meaning to build new emotional and psychological images.