The word as a "spell on things" (the phenomenon of children's speech in Andrei Bely's Kotik Letaev and Lev Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech)

The article examines the concept of children's speech as an ontological phenomenon. The research is based on Andrei Bely's Kotik Letaev and Lev Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech. The main symbolic principles of Bely's word formation are explored in this paper through the connection with the etymology of the child's word. Vygotsky's analysis of child's mind and speech is used to investigate the psychological aspect of this theme. Bely determines the creation of a symbol as a "resurrection" of words, a return to their original, inner form. The term "inner form" was clarified by the famous linguist A.A. Potebnja. Both Vygotsky and Bely were familiar with his works. The child purifies words from the weight of their historical meanings and interpretations to a clean phenomenon that defines particular things. The inner form of the word is emphasized during this process. As a structure of great importance it contains our ancestors' emotions about things and a predicative undertone (the concept of the purpose of a thing): the first person who possessed the power of speech tried to put a "spell on a thing" in the process of naming. Bely was especially interested in similarity between child's words and the first human words in the era of irrational thinking, in the age of mythology. Children are able to hear the inner form and inner expressiveness of the word. Adults have to symbolize reality to return the feeling of the original sacrali-ty of the word. As a result, the narrator in Bely's novel Kotik Letaev has two voices: the first one can feel the power and beauty of the word inner form; the second one sanctifies the reality by symbols-occasionalisms. According to Vygotsky, child's speech and thinking are usually separated at the age of two, after that they start to affect each other. The structure of the novel Kotik Letaev repeats Vygotsky's thoughts about the connection between thinking and speaking: one could name the period before Kasianovo the sensual stage of thinking, after Kasianovo the intellectual stage, when a child could operate pseudo-notions but without abstract elements in them. Therefore, children often make logical mistakes while speaking. Most errors are based on metaphors, which children refuse to understand. Kotik Letaev simplifies the metaphor and during this process returns to the mythological reality, which has a strong impact on the symbolic worldview. Child's words are free of historical meanings and have the ability to bewitch the reality. They contain the whole sentence in one sign; they are highly predicative and emotional because of the purified inner form. The article proves that Andrey Bely created a system of authorial occasionalisms using methods of child's word formation such as increasing the number of predicates, derivations of new verbs from nouns, free usage of prefixes.

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