LINGUISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF THE OTHERWORLD AS A SPACE IN A LITERARY TEXT

Abstract

The category of space, originally related to the field of scientific knowledge of philosophy, became the subject of linguistic research in the XX century after the structurallinguistic turn and the Sepir-Whorf hypothesis, which allowed expanding the possibilities of philological analysis of literary texts. Space is closely related to the understanding of time, so it is still difficult to interpret these categories without appealing to another one. There are many approaches to the definition of « space»: through chronotope, locativity, and text-forming categories; researchers understand space as a «specific system of signs», a «modeling language», and spatial metaphors. Therefore, the relevance of the work is seen in the deepening of research affecting the art space.The article pays special attention to the typology of space in works of art. The novelty of the work is expressed in an attempt to identify and describe the linguistic features of the space of the otherworld, which was actively addressed by writers and playwrights of the Silver Age of Russian literature. This is explained by the fact that the subjective (that is, the space created by the author) has its own structure, independence, it is developed by the individual consciousness, which, in turn, is a historical consciousness with a space-time concept of an era, culture. The core of the work of the writers of the beginning of the XX century was not real life, but subjective visions and experiences, behind which the symbolists wanted to recognize the reflections of invisible fire, the radiance of mysterious worlds, meanings that could not be translated into the language of logic. Real space ceases to be real, it is a model, an imitation, a representation of the existing world in an abstract sense.The otherworld, which in dictionaries is understood as a space opposed to the real, as the space of a literary text has different characteristics: it does not necessarily belong to the locus of the fantastic or «unreal», its main feature is to enter into an antithesis with the space in which the hero is initially located, to be different from the «real» space by a set of not only external features, but also the state of the characters moving into it.The paper presents and describes the main linguistic units with which the space of the otherworld is verbalized in literary texts of the beginning of the XX century.

Keywords

• space
• otherworld
• literary text
• language
• philological analysis