Plot Construction of the Playful Text through the Psychological Prism of Artistic World-modelling

This article analyses the complex architectonics of playful artistic texts that reflect the principles of the author’s world modelling. The fundamental methodological approach is to define such texts as works in which language play performs a plotforming function. In this context, S. D. Krzhizhanovsky’s novella In the Pupil is characterised, vividly revealing the peculiarities of the writer’s playful idiostyle, for whom experimentation with words serves as a means of creating a psychological perspective for viewing events in the context of the plot. The authors reveal the psychological background of different “paths” of love associated with the problem of self-identification. This theme appears in the light of the main character’s selfreflection as an internal dialogue, conditioned by the presence of two images in the subject – his own “I” and his double in the form of an interlocutor. The narrator who is also the character is likened to a “man in front of a mirror” in which he looks at himself “through his own eyes with someone else’s eyes”, which essentially determines all the lines of stereoscopic optics of the plot perspective developed by the author. The forms and functions of language play in given plot projections are closely focused on. Special attention is paid to the forms and functions of language play within the specified plot projections. Playemes are highlighted as conceptually significant for plot-modelling, those correlating with the text’s key symbol (the pupil) and with textual micro-themes in plot development, as well as various forms of parodic stylisation (philosophisms and phraseological transforms). The writer’s artistic world modelling vividly demonstrates the playful optics of “shift” and estrangement, which explicate the thought processes hidden in the “black box” of human consciousness. The intersection of temporal and spatial, real and unreal plot lines creates a stereoscopic image of manifestations of love in the light of its essential role in the self-cognition and self-realisation of an individual. A special angle of the author’s strategy of artistic world modelling is the intra-plot scenarios that convey versions of the relationship between a man and a woman from the perspective of the main character’s former lovers. In the finale of the novella, all the events described are presented by the narrator in the form of a plan for a future work of art highlighting S. D. Krzhizhanovsky’s expressionist style as a subtly thought-out strategy of the writer’s play with the reader

Character (mathematics) · Context (archaeology) · Novella · Perspective (graphical) · Plot (graphics) · Reflexive pronoun · Symbol (formal) · Theme (computing) · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies · Psycholinguistics and Behavioral Studies · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies