Implicit Assimilations as Manifestation of the Author's Values in the Language of the Novel “The Kukotsky Enigma” by L. Ulitskaya

Abstract

Against the background of explicit ways of expressing comparisons in their broad understanding (as constituents of the functional-semantic field of comparativeness), this article considers the indirect presence of assimilations, the "target" of which are the characters of L. Ulitskaya's novel The Kukotsky Enigma and the related signed circumstances of the time being depicted. It is shown how comparisons by similarities implicitly expressed in the novel reflect the idiostylic features of the author, inclined to the detailed and often veiled expression of the severe aversion of the supporters of the Bolshevik ideology that defends the pseudoscientific "achievements" of the times of Soviet Power. The ways of representing content-subtext information in contexts with implicitly expressed assimilations, that is: the use of alogisms, allusions, metaphor-metonymic uses, antonyms, evaluative enantiosemia, "samples" of Soviet rhetoric with the "modus of importance", verbal play on the associative-derivational basis. The description of implicit assimilations in the language of the novel by L. Ulitskaya is preceded by brief explanations of the structure of the functional-semantic field of comparativeness in the Russian language, according to V. P. Berkov [1996], and the position of metaphors (as a mediated comparison by similarity) in this field. The article presents the forms of expressions for explicit comparatives and non-labeled comparatives (instrumental and genitive assimilations, nominal comparative predicate). Non-labeled comparatives are on the boundary between traditionally understood comparison and metaphor; the differences between metaphor and these syncretic forms of comparativeness are also identified.