The semiotics of invariants of the “water” archetype (rivers, seas) in the text of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time

Manifestation of the archetype “water” in the text of the novel A Hero of Our Time is the object of study in the article. Interpretations of manifestation meanings of the archetype “water” (rivers, seas) are based on the methodology of semiotic analysis of the myth and ritual and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic schools. The methodology of variant and invariant analysis is applied in the article with a view on diachronic decoding of the system of signs (sea, river) as elements of the meaning of the archetype “water”. A semiotic range in this study is constituted by a paradigm of manifestations of the archetype “water” which are identified in the novel in several invariant connotations of natural phenomena (rivers, seas). The decoding of semiotics of aquatic symbols towards their myth and ritual origins facilitates the refinement of the novel’s chronotope. The archetype “water” is presented in Lermontov’s text in forms of manifestations combined in several semantic ranges: (1) water-related personification in a feminine image: a girl-ondine in “Taman”, ladies - “mistresses of water” in “Pechorin’s Diary”; (2) exact geographical realities that are given by aquatic codes: the Aragva, the Kuban, the Terek, the Podkumok, the Kamennyy brod, the Elizabethan fountain, the Kislovodsk well with narzan, waterfall, sea; (3) link of the archetype “water” with the spirit world underlined by an idiom chosen by Maksim Maksimych in order to characterize the state of Azamat who Pechorin mocked at while praising the horse of Kazbich every time: “Grigoriy Aleksandrovich exasperated Azamat to such an extent with his teasing that the boy was ready even to drown himself’; (4) reading the route by sea as a road to the other world (sea has such semantics in the chapter “Taman” where Pechorin almost drowned). Water marks the chronotope of the novel, designates its boundaries, semantisizes the centre and the periphery: a well with the healing water is located in the centre of the world explored by Pechorin while the smugglers’ house, where “something wrong” is happening, is located on the edge of the town, on the bank of river, i.e. actually on the edge of the human’s world and the world of nature. Various manifestations of the archetype “water” in the text of A Hero of Our Time structure the space and time in the novel according to oppositions; integrity and orderliness are reported to the novel chronotope. The semiotics of the archetype “water” in the text of the novel, established by the diachronic decoding of the meaning of images in which the water element is presented, is the result of a re-semantization of the archaic and folkloric meanings of various manifestations of the archetype “water”. At the same time, the archaic meanings work at the levels of the semantics and pragmatics of the text as markers for communicating with the reader, aimed at finding the full meaning of the text of the novel as a whole. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.