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Abstract: The article deals with the creative evolution of the outstanding prose writer of the second half of the twentieth century V. Astafiev (1924–2001). The object of the study covers textual representation of the artistic concept of the star in Astafiev’s early novella “Starfall”. The author’s aim is to identify the specificity of the use of this concept in relation to the dominant topos of light for the writer’s supertext created throughout his life. The current analytical approach was created in line with the theory of concep-tology. The term “artistic concept”, which correlates with the most effective tools for realization of the literary criticism variants of conceptual analysis of a fiction text, was used as a key one. When creating the analytical methodology, the author takes into ac-count the modern principles of interpretation of a literary text based on the theory of linguistic stylistic analysis developed by V. V. Vinogradov, Jung’s idea of the dependence of an individual author’s worldview on the experience of previous generations, and the principles of “reverse historicism” and “archaeology of the humanities” developed by M. Foucault. The study concludes that the material under analysis suggests that the artistic concept of the star is located in the associative field, the core of which is made up by the topos of light, even in the early works of Astafiev. The dynamics of the semantic content of the concept in the novella “Starfall” reflects the nature of the writer’s creative evolution in the period, determined primarily by the open pulsation of ancestral and na-tional memory. In the later period, during the creation of the last versions of the “secret story” “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess” and an attempt at confession in “From the Quiet Light”, the formation of the writer’s artistic philosophy is influenced by the tragic events of the last years of his life, by the active desire of his inner circle to develop the Orthodox worldview and world perception and by radical changes taking place in the public consciousness. The unfinished “attempt at confession” also testifies to the fact that for many reasons Astafiev did not manage to get closer to finding Grace at the end of his life. The results obtained can be employed in the modern academic higher and secondary school courses “The History of Russian Literature of the Twentieth Century”, and might be useful for creating a modern historico-literary conception.

About the author(s) :

Nаtalia S. Tsvetova
Saint Petersburg State University
F. M. Dostoevsky Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy (Saint Petersburg, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4093-0427

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 29.03.2024; date of publication: 24.06.2024

References:

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