“Greece” semantic field in Marina Tsvetaeva’s idiolect

Abstract

The presentation of an author’s individual linguistic picture of the world by describing the structure and content of semantic fields is one of the relevant areas of literary texts’ and author idiolects’ analysis in modern linguistics. The article is devoted to the semantic and associative analysis of the lexemes comprising the “Greece” semantic field in Marina Tsvetaeva’s idiolect. The analysis enables to state the correlations between the “Greece” and other key semantic fields and to identify universal and the author’s individual semantic meanings and associations of the lexemes, which form the core and periphery of the semantic field “Greece”. The latter aspect of the analysis has not come into the linguistic research focus yet. The analysis of semantic fields is especially effective in the study of Marina Tsvetaeva’s idiolect, which is characterized by semantic compression, dynamism in the unfolding of meanings and semantic capacity of words. The core of the semantic field under study is the lexeme Greece, the center of the field includes the one-root words Greek, a Greek, the synonym Hellas, as well as its derivatives. The periphery of the field consists of toponyms, names of garments, numerous ancient anthroponyms and theonyms. The lexemes of the semantic field “Greece” also represent other significant semantic fields in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetic, prose and epistolary texts. They denote the following meanings and associations: ‘culture’, ‘education’, ‘creativity’, ‘love for freedom’, ‘Orthodox faith’, ‘kindness, generosity’. The semantic field “Greece” is mainly associated with people dear to the poetess: her father Ivan Tsvetaev, Maximilian Voloshin, Rainer Maria Rilke. Recreating the spirit and culture of Greece, Tsvetaeva embodied the image of an era close to her, a country native to her in spirit and in which she did not have to be disappointed.