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Abstract: The article studies metonymy in A. Platonov’s war stories. The research is based on the assumption that within the boundaries of the writer’s artistic method, metonymy is not just a means of expression, but a tool for conceptualizing reality. For this kind of modeling of military reality in the artistic space, Platonov integrates the image of a child, metonymically associated with a number of value-based categories of the Russian people, into the composition of the story. To confirm the assumption for-mulated above, the author of the article carries out an analysis of the imagery of the stories “Across the Midnight Sky” and “The Girl Rose”, which allows making a conclusion about the significance of the metaphor for the realization of the writer’s creative intention at conceptual level. Considering the role of metonymy in the artistic presentation of children’s consciousness, the author of the article looks at the short stories “Across the Midnight Sky” and “The Girl Rose”. The first story argues that the image of a child and children’s consciousness is opposed to “mechanical” people (and, relatedly, to fascism as a phenomenon). The image of the sky, also metonymically used in the story, is the key image to understanding Erich Zummer’s discovery, which brought him closer to the moral purity of the child’s worldview: embodying the dialectic of the author’s attitude to war (the transition from darkness to light and from light to darkness), the sky appears in the eyes of the child at the moment of Zummer’s renunciation of fascism. In the story “The Girl Rose”, the plot follows a similar logic: the fate of a pure soul who fills the world with the light of memory and hope is revealed to the reader. The angelic nature of Rosa is connected not only with her martyrdom, but also with the hope (“the light of death”, “moral excess”), which she generously gives to all those who suffer on earth, who have not lost the ability to feel a living soul. The research draws on the works written in the area of Platonov studies devoted to metonymy as an element of Platonov’s poetics (N. V. Kornienko, S. Nonako, B. Dooge, etc.).

About the author(s) :

Anton A. Dolgov
Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-9125-4344

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 30.08.2024; date of publication: 30.10.2024

References:

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