Means of expressing the category of intensity and their role in creating the image of the city in L. N. Andreev’s story "The Curse of the Beast"

Abstract

The need for a holistic linguistic analysis of such a little-studied literary phenomenon as Russian expressionism determines the relevance of the research. Analysis can be performed through systematising the ways of conveying expressivity as an aesthetic norm of this movement. These means include the intensity category representants distinguished by the pragmatically fixed function of impact enhancers. In addition, studying the versatile literary creativity of L. N. Andreev, "the first expressionist in Russian prose", we can comprehend the unique features of the writer ’s individual style from new perspectives while analysing his intensification solutions. The article aims to study the expressive potential of different-level intensity-expressing means considering the expressionistic tendencies in creating the key image of the city in "one of the most ʻhighly publicised’ works" by L. N. Andreev, i. e. the story "The Curse of the Beast". The linguistic material was selected using the continuous sampling method. Contextual analysis identified the specific features of actualising the meanings of certain intensity representants. Definitional analysis made it possible to identify the presence/absence of an intensifying component in the semantics of a particular word. Linguostylistic analysis was used to deter mine the specifics of the intensification mechanism while studying the author’s individual style. The article concludes that the use of means of expressing intensity, which on the pages of the story become a way of categorising the expressionist world perception, is a specific technique for influencing the reader ’s perception when describing the city. At the level of linguistic organisation of the text, the study has demonstrated how urban space is presented in deformed images – visual, temporal, auditory – with the help of the means expressing such semantics. They are grouped around the dominant textual concepts of "quantity", "size", "speed", "temperature", "extent", "sound". Moreover, when creating an urban text, L. N. Andreev shifts the focus from the usual description of the setting to "visible emotions" (which is in the spirit of the expressionist movement) with the help of abundant multielement linguistic units.