Вестник Кемеровского государственного университета (Feb 2014)
THE MECHANISM OF ACTION OF THE NON-EXISTENCE METAPHOR IN A. A. KABAKOV’S STORY «PROJECT “BABYLON”»
Abstract
The address to A. A. Kabakov’s creative individuality is actual in the context of small amount of works, investigating his prose. The novelty of the research consists in revealing a method of metaphor realization on the material of one of the writer’s little-studied stories.In the paper the mechanism of action of the comprehensive metaphor «Project “Babylon”» is revealed, which embodies non-existence, based on the story with the same name by the modern writer A. A. Kabakov. The metaphor semantics manifests itself by means of interaction of a canonical (stable) sense of the expression «Babel», referring to the biblical story, and a secular (daily) meaning of the situation of the «pillar creation» – an élite tower house. A renewed metaphorical meaning of the idiom «Babel» is proposed. The state of «non-existence» is determined by motives of death and disappearance of the human kind, its devil’s temptation and the Apocalypse, senselessness and an existential frustration of people, a cultural degradation of the society and the ecumenical chaos.The paper is based on a historical and literary approach, whose academic base is N. D. Arutyunova’s work on the metaphor theory.The theoretical significance of the paper lies in the consideration of the phenomenon of poetics of the post-modernist prose. The practical significance is determined by the possibility of using its observations in university courses, devoted to actual problems of the modern Russian literature.
