The forms of confession in Gaito Gazdanov’s short story "The Third Life"

Abstract

The article focuses on ways of representing the psychological state of the hero in G.I. Gazdanov's story "The Third Life". The polyphonic leitmotif memory/recollection includes direct and summative ways of expressing the psychological state of the narrator. The replacement of these forms makes it possible to move from mental illness to access to a third life, explicated by intensities, extensities, comparisons, perceptual images. The prospective expectation of the appearance of ideas about the third life is associated with the mode of doubt, symptoms of mental illness, fantasy-dreams of artistic creativity The beginning of the third life is marked by the accentuation of the perceptual background (smells, synesthetic metaphor, visual comparisons). The symbolic title, decoded in comparisons, comes closer to the leitmotif of the two-worldness; the individual author's associate - the third life correlates with the search for G.I. Gazdanov's heroes of the lyrical world, sentimental trance, spiritual journey as the leitmotif complex of the writer's idiolexicon.