The paper deals with the semantic, structural and poetic functions of text universals, typical for 'duma' (ballade) epos text-forming units. The study revealed that the themes of the analyzed structures belong to various semantic 'families' e.g. conversation, trouble, damnation, site, never, etc. As a whole the semantic text macro-universals represent predicative text universals which, in majority cases, are expressed by a compound sentence: the complex syntactic whole or a complex syntactic design; such formations are characterized by the maximal cohesion of components therefore they get aphoristic sense.