Convergence of speech art devices in the small prose by T. Tolstaya

This research has been carried out within the context of linguopoetics. The results of linguopoetics research of small prose of T. Tolstaya are presented in the article. These stories were written at the end of the 20th century. T. Tolstaya is known as a representative of neo-Baroque, one of the branches of Russian postmodernism. The small prose of T. Tolstaya is characterized by a very complex and expressive speech art form. The complexity of the speech art form is shown by the active use of artistic foregrounding elements (words and word combinations). Artistic foregrounding (J. Mukarovsky's term) is a deviation (artistically motivated deviation) from the linguistic or communicative norm that increases the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic goal in itself and has to be prolonged. High concentration of artistic foregrounding elements - arthemes (G.I. Klimovskaya's term) - creates interaction of speech art devices, i.e. their convergence (M. Riffater's term). The paper presents an analysis of the convergence of metaphorical and metonymical transfer and semantic syncretism. The speech artistic device of semantic syncretism is simultaneous updating of several lexical meanings of a polysemantic word in the literary text. As a result of the convergence of the above-mentioned speech artistic devices, within a single phrase a new level of arthemes is formed: convergent arthemes. The main method of the analysis of linguopoetics of speech art form units in the research is the application of the "stylistic experiment of L.V. Shcherba, A.M. Peshkovsky and L.C. Vygotsky", the procedural kernel of which consists of two separate methodological stages: 1) comparison of semantic volumes of an artheme and its stylistically neutral equivalent, a separate word which does not have stylistic marks in dictionaries or a free (non-phraseological) word combination; 2) linguopoetic interpretation of dissimilarity in the semantic volumes of these units taking into account the local context of the phrase and the global context of the book. The method proves to be highly effective in analyzing texts with a complicated speech art form because of high density of arthemes, in solving one of the tasks of linguopoetics - identification of art devices used by author. In this article, the convergence of artistic devices is examined by the linguopoetic analysis of separate fragments from T. Tolstaya's stories "On the Golden Porch" ("Na zolotom kryl'tse sideli...", 1983), "Most Beloved" ("Samaya lubimaya", 1986), "The Moon came out of the Fog" ("Vyshel mesyats is tumana", 1987), "Sweet Shura" ("Milaya Shura", 1985), "Loves Me, Loves Me Not" ("Lubish - ne lubish", 1984), "Sonya" (1984), "Fakir" (1986), "Circle" ("Krug", 1987).

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