Personification in the Socio-Psychological Prose of Mikhail Lermontov

Abstract

Personification belongs to one of the fairly frequently used figurative devices, but it still has to be explored. In particular, this refers to Mikhail Lermontov’s prose. Along with that, the identification and objectification of the author’s style is important for literary criticism and translation studies. Within the broad frame of the term, personification can be interpreted as giving an inanimate object or a purely abstract thing the characteristics of an animate being, endowed with feeling and life. The present paper focuses on the description and functional analysis of personification in Lermontovian socio-psychological prose. The database built for this scrutiny contains three Lermontov’s novels written at different periods of his literary life: “Vadim” (1832–1834), “Princess Ligovskaya” (1836–1837) and “A Hero of Our Time”. Because of its brevity, the essay “The Caucasian” (1841) serves as a source of additional illustrative material. Adescriptive and functional analysis employs semantic, contextual and quantitative methods. A unit of observation is the “key lexical item” that, in conjunction with the referent, allows us to identify and categorize personification. The paper describes the main structural and semantic features of personification and investigates its principal functions in Lermontov’s texts. In particular, it has been shown that examples of personification in the novel make a kind of network designed to create a literary space focused on Nature and Man as an integral element of the earthly world. Furthermore, the current study demonstrates that personification accomplishes five basic functions in Lermontov’s prose: figurative, aesthetic, ludic, intertextual, and compositional. The undertaken study contributes to systematizing numerous examples of personification in Lermontov’s prose, and emphasizes the importance of further research aimed to clarify the impact of figurative devices on the internal architectonics of literary texts.