Alive and dead toys: the concept of a game in A. S. Grin’s novella "Scarlet Sails"

Abstract

The relevance of the topic is determined by three factors. Firstly, Grin’s texts are regularly offered as examination material for the Basic State Exam and the Unified State Exam in the Russian language. Secondly, the "Scarlet Sails" feerie studied in secondary school is often interpreted loosely and broadly due to a superficial analysis of the language and the composition of the work. Finally, the need to teach schoolchildren not just to determine the linguistic and literary properties of a text, but to comprehend the content of an artwork holistically is consistently becoming more and more urgent. I rely on the general philological principle according to which any aspect of the analysis of the subject matter of a text is associated with understanding the meaning of this text in its entirety. The research used the methods of contextual analysis of the semantics and of comparative analysis of language structures, the statistical method, the intertextual method, motif analysis and others. In the course of the study, it has been found that the theme game and its aspects belong to the content core of the work and interact with the themes of childhood, miracle, creativity, faith, and others. The diametrically opposed evaluative connotations of the concept "Toy" are directly related to the problems addressed in the novella and the writer՚s position. The text makes extensive use of the derivational nest with the top "game". Moreover, the most frequent lexeme is the noun "toy" (17 cases out of the 38 uses of the root -game-). The elaboration of the thematic field is achieved through the multiple paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections of the thematic keywords. The concept of a game performs a structure-forming function in the system of characters and concerns not only the protagonists, but also the supporting characters. The theme of the game is further developed in the plot. It is figuratively embodied in the details that form the artistic world of the text.