THE MYTHOLOGEME "PODRÓŻ" / "TRAVELS" AND ITS LINGUISTIC REPRESENTERS IN OLGA TOKARCHUK’S NOVEL "BIEGUNI" ("RUNNER")

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The article is devoted to the study of the means of linguistic objectification of the mythologeme "PODRÓŻ" / "TRAVELS" in Olga Tokarchuk’s novel "Bieguni". Mythological thinking as a special kind of world-view includes a sensory, figurative understanding of natural phenomena and facts of social life. The main purpose of the article is to analyze the linguistic representation of the mythologeme "TRAVELS" by Polish writer Olga Tokarchuk, the winner of literary prizes ("Nike" 2008, International Booker Prize, Nobel Prize 2018). The research material provides an opportunity to reveal the archetypal and topical understanding of the mythologeme "TRAVELS", characteristic not only for the mythopoetic thinking of the archaic society, but also for the consciousness of contemporary speakers, and the individual author’s world-view of the literary discourse regarded. To achieve this goal, methods of descriptive, component and discursive analysis are used. The analysis allows us to state that O. Tokarchuk provides rather complete information about this mythological phenomenon, which is both a static structure because it contains a system of images and a dynamic one, because it is able to unfold in the form of a plot. The author creatively interprets and modifies the archetypal mythologeme, which embodies the human aptitude for travels and travelling as cognition of the world around, one of the manifestations of human freedom, filling it with new culturally marked semantics, creating a special mythosymbolic model of the world in which the mythologeme "PODRÓŻ" can mean life, interpersonal contacts, loneliness in the crowd, movement without movement, movement as an exploration of oneself through the cognition of the world around, search for the mystery of existence, etc. Only by travelling, says the writer, we can reconstruct the link lost by the mankind between individual traditions and cultures. We see the prospects of the research in the further separation of archetypal and individual authorial treatment in literary texts in the interpretation of mythologists.