UDC

81’42(045)

DOI

10.17238/issn2227-6564.2019.1.75

Authors

Elena V. Polikarpova
Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov; nab. Severnoy Dviny 17, Arkhangelsk, 163002, Russian Federation;
e-mail: polikarpova.narfu@yandex.ru

Abstract

This article dwells on the stylistic originality of Eugene Gagarin’s novella Die alte Hofdame. The paper analyses the ways of connecting the author’s intentions with the choice of linguistic means of describing and commenting on the characters and events. Gagarin applies stylistic devices based on opposition, such as paradox, antithesis, antonymy, lexical conversion, meiosis, and oxymoron. Each of them expresses the author’s intention in its own way, based on the specific action mechanism of expression. Thus, paradox underlines the inconsistency of the situation due to the extreme incomparability of the narrative planes. Both antithesis and antonymy juxtapose situations or specific actions; however, antithesis is used on the sentence level, while antonymy involves words of different parts of speech, most typically nouns, verbs and adjectives. The stylistic technique of lexical conversion allows us to see two parallel actions in one and the same description. The expression of meiosis is in organic relationship with the author’s intention, emphasizing the significance of the described event by highlighting the importance of an episode of this event. Difficult, contradictory and mutually excluding circumstances are described through oxymoron. It is noteworthy that the cumulative expression of several stylistic devices based on opposition allows the author to achieve a striking contrast between actual reality and assumed reality. As a result, the linguistic stylistic analysis showed that due to the layering and interweaving of different stylistic devices as well as to their interchange of planes of expression, the reader is able to trace in Gagarin’s novella the episodes from the life of an elderly woman embodying old – pre-Soviet – Russia.

Keywords

Eugene Gararin, Die alte Hofdame, stylistic device, cumulative expression, lexical conversion, antonymy, paradox, oxymoron, author’s intention

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