Metonymy in the Structure of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Prose

The study discusses the problem of the part and the whole in Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose. The research material was the poet’s autobiographical works about childhood and memories of contemporaries. Works on metonymy by A.N. Veselovsky, R.O. Jakobson, M.L. Gasparov, G. Lakoff, M. Johnson, T.V. Tsvigun, E.V. Paducheva, as well as works by A. Smith, K. Grelts, E.V. Fedorova, in which montage is seen as an important compositional device of Tsvetaeva’s prose, became the methodological basis of the study. In the course of the research, the authors employed the structural-semantic method of literary analysis and the linguistic analysis of the text, and commented on Tsvetaeva’s prose works with her letters. The article discusses the relationship between the part and the whole at different levels: from portrait or interior details to metatext. As a result, the authors come to the conclusion that metonymy and its special case of synecdoche in Tsvetaeva’s prose are not just tropes, but structureforming principles. Also, synecdoche and metonymy can be considered as a way of perceiving the world by an autobiographical heroine. The functions of metonymy and synecdoche, its variety, are widely represented in Tsvetaeva’s works. Acting, like other tropes, as forms of artistic thought, these metacategories (Roman Jakobson) play an important role both in the composition of separate texts and their fragments, and in the full autobiographical metatext. In particular, the principles of metonymy and synecdoche form the basis of Tsvetaev’s montage: they are used in the titles, creating references to the poet’s environment and uniting the persons mentioned in the titles in a separate space. Tsvetaeva uses synecdoche characterizing her autobiographical heroine through collective identity, for example, in her works on childhood, through her belonging to the “children” groups, including “Asya and I”, as well as “all witnesses and participants of the events”. The principle of kinship, which is often realized through spatial metonymy, stands out: neighboring houses, including summer cottages, going to the same school allow Tsvetaeva to talk about inner community with her contemporaries. In exile, a person who has visited Russia at least once may turn out to be “native”. The world of objects in Tsvetaeva’s prose is also built on the principle of metonymy: a thing is in close connection with its owner, can be equated with the owner, act as his/her substitute, evoke the same feelings as its owner. In the heroine-child’s consciousness, the image of a person can break up into a number of substituting objects. The autobiographical heroine-child often uses metonymy to replace abstract concepts with concrete ones. At the same time, objectification in her mind is aweless when it comes to the created reality. A portrait detail is important if it becomes an occasion for reflection on the inner world of a person, that is, Tsvetaeva’s description of her appearance is based on the relationship between the container (body) and the content (soul). Finally, an attempt is made to connect the discreteness of thought, constructions of texts, and the disruption of linearity via constant ruptures of the narration, all of which are characteristic of Tsetaeva, with a metonymic perception of the world. Metonymy enables the creation of a multivariate artistic system, constructed contrarily to the principle of linearity. The displayed feature characterizes, in the author’s opinion, Tsvetaeva’s creative process, the poetic and prosaic aspects of which are, on the whole, similar.

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