The conceptual framework of I.A. Bunin's short story 'The Saints'

Abstract

The conceptual framework of I.A. Bunin’s short story “The Saints” (1914) was analyzed with regard to its connection with the Orthodox axiology. The relevance of the paper is determined by the steady interest of modern linguistics in the study of the religious conceptual framework and its representative vocabulary. The means of Orthodox semantics explication in the literary text were analyzed. The onomastic units of the story and their conceptual significance were considered. The paper uses a complex research methodology that enables a comprehensive study of the linguistic representation of the meaning of the concept: the method of conceptual analysis, the method of component analysis, the method of continuous sampling. As a result of the study, the conceptual framework of I. A. Bunin’s story “The Saints” was reconstructed. It was revealed that the conceptual framework of this story is based on the following concepts: saint, salvation, miracle, suffering, crying, joy, love, longing, icon, etc. Particular conclusions were made about the distinctive features of I.A. Bunin’s poetics: the conceptualization and strengthening of the value component of the meanings of individual lexical units in the literary text. The ways used by I.A. Bunin to shape the meaning of concepts in the literary text were determined: the expansion of the semantic volume of the word, binary oppositions, associative connections with different concepts, comparative constructions. The study can be helpful in special courses on cultural linguistics, as well as on the problems of studying the writer’s linguistic worldview.

Keywords

• semantics of language units
• artistic text
• concept
• conceptual framework
• writer’s linguistic worldview
• i.a. bunin
• orthodox worldview
• proper name