Article

Name: Spinning a new patch of life: a thread of knotted concepts in Nikolay Kononov’s prose

Authors:

Kaliningrad branch of Military Training and Research Centre Admiral N. Kuznetsov Naval Academy

Abstract: The article examines a system of key concepts in Nikolay Kononov’s short story Amnesia of Anastasia as well as in his other works. The authors of the article consider two main concepts «life» and «death» and reveal their mythopoetic semantics of mutual transition. The writer reconstructs an «eternal return» myth and equates the following binary oppositions: «beginning – ending», «wedding – funeral», «joy – mourning», «female – male», «immovability – movement». One of the key sources of «eternal return» is the idea of identity between a conceptual domain describing the process of speech production and concepts of spinning, knitting, plaiting, sewing and weaving. The concepts form a single conceptual space with a variety of meanings that become clear through intratextual and intertextual parallels, mythological plots, etymology and linguistic means, including multilingual anagrammatic code. The authors of the article identify a semantic invariant and show different ways of its explication. The results of the research possess a great projective power and can be extrapolated to other N. Kononov’s works.

Keywords: Nikolai Kononov, mythopoetics, circular time, opposition «life – death», multilingual anagrammatic code, anagram, language game, intertext, levels of explicit and implicit semantics, semantic reconstruction

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