The Inner World of Homo in the light of Cultural Codes Represented in Russian and Kazakh Literary discourse

Abstract

The last several decades saw the growing relevance of studying culture through language because latter provides researchers with information about the world and a person’s place within it. All these different manifestations of human culture, reflected and fixed in the language, are studied by linguoculturology. This article explores the linguocultural manifestations of different yet interrelated ethnic groups — Russian and Kazakh. The purpose of this study was to describe the inner world of a person, his or her feelings and emotions in the process of linguocultural analysis of cultural codes by which this world is represented. The study was performed on the material of fictitious texts of Russian and Kazakh authors. The author defines the notion “cultural code” and analyzes figurative (metaphoric) com­parisons, which, along with metaphor and metonymy, are one of the ways to create a secondary world. The components of the figurative comparison belong to different orders, while the ability of human consciousness to correlate phenomena from different spheres of the surrounding world lies at the heart of the system of cultural codes. The results show that the main cultural codes arising in the Russian and Kazakh fiction in describing the inner world of homo, belong to natural and biomorphic codes. The author concludes that the presence of natural tokens and biomorphic cultural tokens in comparisons of human feelings and emotions reflect the archetypal ideas of people about nature. This means that in the consciousness of a modern person there is still an inextricable link between the substances “the inner world of human” and “nature”. The inner world is an integral part of the nature, which is reflected in the language and culture.