Thinkable Worlds of a Literary Text: A Cognitive and Semantic Aspect of the Representation of Time (Based on V.V. Orlov’s Novel Danilov, the Violist)

Abstract

This article studies the temporal organization of a literary text from the standpoint of a cognitive semantic approach. Literary time is considered in close connection with the meanings that form the semantic space of a text. The correlation of events within which literary time is manifested shows the direction of literary time, which, in its turn, participates in the formation of thinkable worlds. The study aimed to determine and describe the features of the construction of thinkable worlds within the literary time semantically marked in a literary text. The practical significance of the research lies in identifying and describing the principles of structuring possible worlds by means of their temporal coordinates, representing a synthesis of a hero’s physical and psychological time, with the inclusion of markers of historical time in the semantic space of a literary text. The author studied V.V. Orlov’s novel Danilov, the Violist using the inductive-deductive and comparative methods, cognitive and semantic analysis, as well as philological interpretation. A conclusion is drawn that literary time in this novel is of great importance for the organization of thinkable worlds. Its most frequent markers are segodnya (‘today’) and teper’ (‘now’), lexicalizing the cognitive and semantic features of a world which reminds the reader of objective reality, albeit distant in historical time, as well as of a fantasy world, whose properties are unreal. Orlov creates a synthesis of the hero’s physical and psychological time, which can also include historical time (in that case, the reader’s background knowledge is involved, making it possible to correctly decode precedent phenomena). The semantics of literary time in the novel is hierarchical and systemic: textual representatives manifest both universal ideas about time and author’s individual variability in the perception of chronological intervals, which
affects the emotional sphere of the reader.