Symbolism of clouds in the idiostyle of Sergey Yesenin (linguistics aspect)

The aim of the article is to analyze the symbolism of clouds in the idiostyle of Sergey Yesenin. The object of the analysis is the “atmospheric phenomena” symbolism within the semantic field of “nature”. The focus of the research is the specificity of the symbolism of clouds in the linguistic image of the poet’s world. The research methods of semantic analysis and linguistic description are used. The material for the analysis is fragments of poetic texts by Sergey Yesenin. An attempt is made to describe the mechanism of creating a symbolic sense, which is also a metaphorical sense and is based on associative, analogous thinking. The factual material illustrates the role of the semantic phenomenon of the contextual connotation of words (lexemes) in a poetic text. The article shows that the symbolism of clouds in Yesenin reflects certain phenomena, e.g., things (beard, lace), atmospheric phenomena (rain), place (cornfield), physical phenomena (chill), animals (horse), perception of the world (unhappiness, illusion, mystery), people (believers). The attention was paid to the exceptional transparency of the phenomenon of things (honey, smoke, threshold, blade, beard, lace, lake, torn clothing (outfit)), which create the so-called functional metaphor. The conducted analysis will contribute to the enrichment of knowledge on the creation of a model of mechanisms controlling symbolic-metaphorical (figurative) thinking, as well as to further studies on the functioning mechanism of associative (metaphorical) thinking. A possibility of comparative analysis of clouds symbolism in the idiostyles of other Russian or European poets is suggested.