RUSSIA Art Concept as National Concept Variant

Abstract

The article is devoted to the presentation of the results of the analysis of the concept RUSSIA as a fragment of art discourse and at the same time a fragment of the national picture of the world formed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - a turning point in the history of the state. The specificity of the concept RUSSIA as a concept-stereotype is determined by its direct correlation with the self-identification of representatives of a social group, which allows to qualify it as a national picture of the world dominant. As a source of material for the reconstruction of the concept, the text of Maxim Gorky’s novel “Life of Klim Samgin” is used, in which the author genius materializes the reflection of the Russian intelligentsia as a social layer in the diversity of its representatives. The study focuses on corpus content analysis combined with statistical, contextual, distributive and component analysis techniques. The novel polysubjectness determined by the genre of the epic novel and kaleidoscopic points of view associated with it allowed to imagine the concept model in the form of a matrix, filling of which by lexical material is determined both by individualized ideological position, by particular social group, and by event background. Analysis of the immediate environment of RUS / RUSSIA concept names revealed several semantic areas (slots), entering into a complex system of mutual relations: “power - intelligentsia - people,” “revolution - revolt,” “Europe - West,” “disease” and “money.” The periphery of the conceptual design includes slots “landscape,” “drinking,” “Church / faith.” The system links of the slots are so numerous and multidirectional that it is extremely difficult to distinguish the absolute dominant of the concept and to present its structure as hierarchical.

Keywords

• art discourse
• national self-identity
• text concept
• concept verbalizers
• concept-stereotype
• concordance