Рассказ «Небо» С.Н. Сергеева-Ценского в контексте аксиологем/констант православной языковой картины мира

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of studying the semantics of language units in literature, in particular, the functioning of axiological concepts in fiction. The material of the research is S.N. SergeyevTsensky’s story “The Sky” (1908). The purpose of the article was to explore the story’s conceptual sphere associated with Orthodox axiology and identify intertextual links with the Bible. The following axiological concepts were chosen as the object of this study: baby, sky, non-resistance to evil/resistance to evil, human dignity, tenderness, cleansing, God-man/man-God, and others. These are important concepts for the Russian Orthodox worldview and for S.N. Sergeyev-Tsensky’s linguistic worldview. The direct subject of this study is the semantic explication of these concepts. It should be noted that the research is in line with the leading trends in the contemporary humanities, including the study of the cultural value paradigm. A complex methodology was applied here, combining different methods and techniques: conceptual analysis, component analysis of a literary text, and continuous sampling. This methodology allowed the author to determine the linguistic representation of the concepts’ meanings and reconstruct the conceptual sphere of “The Sky”. In addition, the paper revealed the semantic scope of the axiological concepts and ways of their semantic organization in S.N. Sergeyev-Tsensky’s language, as well as the associative-semantic links between the concepts. Further, the ways of forming the axiologemes’ meanings in “The Sky” were determined: expansion of the word’s semantic scope; binary oppositions; associative relations with different concepts; comparative constructions. Inferences were made about the features of S.N. Sergeyev-Tsensky’s poetics: conceptualization of the meanings of individual linguistic units and enhancement of the value component in the concepts’ structure in secular fiction. The language material under study can be used in special courses on cultural linguistics, on the writer’s linguistic worldview, and on the philological text analysis.