Художественный концепт «прошедшее» в зарубежной прозе И.А. Бунина

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of the peculiarities of the verbalization of the artistic concept “Old days” in the works of I.A. Bunin of the 1920s–40s. A concept is a verbalized mental formation universal for a given language, realized by a language personality as an invariant value of an associative-semantic field. The artistic concept in the work can be considered both as the embodiment of the foundations of the author's worldview, and as the starting point of the dynamic formation of the text, and as the semantic center of this text. This aesthetic mental construct performs 4 main functions: text-forming, plot-forming, meaning-forming and actually figurative. An example of such a phenomenon is the artistic concept “past” in the prose of I. Bunin of the foreign period of his work. The artistic concept of the “past”, unequal to the concept of the “past”, is demonstrated as an example of a typical individual author's concept in the artistic picture of the writer’s world. It is argued that the artistic concept and the universal concept are two varieties of the concept that have specific features. The content of the “past” is often associated with meanings not only temporal, but also ideological, local, and valuable, and the concept can be represented not only by individual lexemes and word combinations, but also by expanded explicants-sentences and microcontexts, which is characteristic of the artistic concept. The conclusions made by the author demonstrate the significance of the analysis of the artistic concept “Old days” not only for understanding the artistic picture of the world of the late I. Bunin, but also for artistic conceptology in general. The results of the study can be applied to the analysis of the representation of artistic concepts in a literary text.