Polilog: Studia Neofilologiczne (Nov 2024)
Dialog języków i kultur w prozie emigracyjnej Nadieżdy Teffi
Abstract
Dialogue of Languages and Cultures in The Emigration Proses of Nadezda Teffi The aim of the article is to present the phenomenon of the dialogue of languages and cultures in the prose of Nadezhda Teffi , an émigré Russian writer, one of the most popular literary fi gures of the fi rst half of the 20th century. The analysis aims to reveal the motifs of foreign cultures and their linguistic representation. All contexts containing direct nominations of cultural motifs were used as research material. The methodology is defi ned by the theory of a comprehensive systemic approach to the researched material, which allows us to consider individual works of Teffi as an example of a dialogue of cultures. A literary text is considered from the point of view of both linguistic and literary analysis. Biographical, structural and formal methods have been used in the research. The material for the analysis was selected on the basis of feuilletons, essays and stories from prose collections published in emigration. At the same time, the world presented in her works is saturated with elements of foreign cultures. The analysis of emigrant prose allows us to distinguish the following cultural spaces: Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The author situates the action of her works in distant cultural spaces or only mentions foreign nomenclature in a historical retrospective. The French cultural space and the everyday life of Russian emigrants who have linked their lives to France, and especially to Paris, remain dominant in Teffi ’s emigrant prose. The spatial organisation of the literary works correlates with the real topography of the city. Teffi ’s emigration stories were, on the one hand, a chronicle of the experience of exile and, on the other, a guide to “Russian Paris”, which is treated as a kind of “cultural sign” in opposition to other “signs”, above all Russia. To describe the new/ foreign cultural space, Teffi actively used foreign language vocabulary to emphasise functioning in a new/foreign cultural space. The vocabulary of foreign cultural realities in Teffi ’s works includes: names of topographical and geographical objects; names of titles of literary works, plays, paintings, musical works; names of dishes of national cuisine; names of historical fi gures, scientists, artists, writers. The notation of the foreign lexicon took a very diverse form: notation in the original version; foreign words in Russian transcription, “linguistic hybrids”. The use of this type of rhetorical fi gure, which consisted in introducing elements of foreign languages into the utterance, was intended to illustrate the linguistic duality of the emigrant.
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