The Category of Interpretability of the Literary Text and the Problem of Multi-Layered Interpretation of Prose (Based on Ivan Bunin’s Short Stories “The Book” and “The Chapel”)

Abstract

Determining the main categories of the literary text is a matter of debate among researchers today. According to the author of this paper, the most significant categories are the following: fiction (virtual information content), egocentricity (image of the author), aesthetics, linguocentricity, and interpretability. The article focuses on the category of interpretability, which is associated with the ability to perceive a text from different perspectives and at different depth levels. Interpretability is the ability of a text to generate ambiguous information that can be read and formulated in different ways and be either perceived or not perceived by the addressee. Description of the interpretability category is exemplified by Bunin’s short stories “The Book” and “The Chapel”. “The Book” allows the reader to perceive several semantic layers, gradually complicating the content of the text and its understanding. This story clearly demonstrates that interpretability of a literary text can reach absolute ambivalence of the perception of this text: life is more important than fictional books, but life itself, probably, exists for the art in order to be embodied in a word. The thesis about multidimensionality and interpretability of the literary text is confirmed when we turn to another short story, “The Chapel”. The analysis of the texts performed demonstrates that a work of art can be perceived ambiguously, its content is interpreted on the basis of acquired additional meanings of its lexical units, various shades of meaning of its syntactic constructions and the possibility to perceive sequential fragments of the text differently, as well as depending on the personality of the addressee. A conclusion is made that the category of interpretability is, indeed, characteristic of the literary text, fully in line with the genre’s specifics, i.e. the aesthetic transformation of meanings in order to create virtual reality with the help of language.

For citation: Sergeeva E.V. The Category of Interpretability of the Literary Text and the Problem of Multi-Layered Interpretation of Prose (Based on Ivan Bunin’s Short Stories “The Book” and “The Chapel”). Vestnik Severnogo (Arkticheskogo) federal’nogo universiteta. Ser.: Gumanitarnye i sotsial’nye nauki, 2021, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 63–71. DOI: 10.37482/2687-1505-V117