The World of Color in I.A. Bunin's short story "Henry": coloratives and sense of Motherland

Abstract

The composition, semantics and functioning of words with color meanings (coloratives) are of interest to researchers specializing in various fields of scientific knowledge. The relevance of studying this group of words is determined with an important trend: to describe the facts of culture fixed in the units of the language, as well as to highlight culturally significant information in them. This tendency is manifested in the study of the writer's language. The analysis of coloratives, their composition and role in Ivan Bunin's multi-genre works is actively conducted, but it is often carried out without focusing on a specific work of art. The article analyzes the coloratives functioning in the text of the story «Henry» (a collection of short stories «Dark Avenues»), which is called a gloomy, or twilight, story. The analysis showed that the writer uses about 120 coloratives in the text of the story, most of which denote bright («daytime») colors (Rus. лиловый, индиго, янтарно-коричневый, цвета луковой шелухи). The nature of the selection of words naming the main colors of the spectrum and their shades in the text of the story shows the author's likes and dislikes. Semantic, lexicographic and linguocultural analysis of landscape and portrait descriptions is carried out against the background of materials from the National Corpus of the Russian language (the Main and Poetic subcorps). The analysis has shown that the coloratives become for the author not only a means of accurately and figuratively describing the world around them, but also a way of expressing the hero's condition and his attitude towards Russia and Europe.