The linguostylistic aspects of image-making in Olha Kobylianska's novella "Pryroda"

Abstract

The notions of dynamism, transience and contradiction that are the cultural constants of the fin de siècle periods, in particular the edge of 19^th–20^th centuries, left their trace upon the character of literary self-consciousness. One-dimensional interpretation of literature as the mere depiction of reality got followed by the new levels of comprehension, which are world modeling and maintenance of special world pictures determined by the writers' intentions.

The author of this article, upon using the close-reading method, investigated the specification of image-making in Olha Kobylianska's novella "Pryroda" (Nature), which is alleged to be the classical genre specimen in Ukrainian Modernism literature. The linguostylistic component as the factor to embody the internal aspects of human thinking (either the writer's or the character's one) in words and thenceforth to impart them to a recipient was taken into consideration; therefore, there have been determined the key linguostylistic elements in plotting Kobylianska's story. Primarily they are chronotopic motifs – a forest as the location of the main action and a town as the factor maintaining the contrasts between rural and urban, masculine and feminine, sacral and secular. Secondly, the writer, following the Modernist traditions of imagery and otherwise creating the new ones, widely used the symbolic details (for instance, a clock and a tree that become animated in the narrator's consciousness) and archetypes – in particular, Jungian Animus and Anima. Another linguistic massif to create the special imagery is the sensory concepts – visual, including the realities and colors of the characters' environment, auditory (the sporadic dialogues between a Hutsul man and a "Ruthenian

Madonna") and olfactory (mostly the scent of grasses). Together with the Neo- Romantic ironic intonation, all the images listed appear to be essential for outlining the characters' hypostases and creating the novelistic Wendepunkt.