The opposition "life/death" in Memories of P.I. Tchaikovsky by N.D. Kashkin

The article deals with the problem of the study of the author's language worldview on the material of the opposition life/death usage in the text of memoirs. The aim of this work was to analyse the functioning of the words related to the opposition life/death, cases of the opposition, as well as to reveal the meanings, most typical for the author, and to come to conclusions on how the author's features of comprehension influence the use of these words in the work. N.D. Kashkin's Memories of P.I. Tchaikovsky, written just after the death of the composer and published in 1894, was used as the material for this study. To analyse the meanings in a tight correspondence with the author's language the third edition of V.I. Dahl's dictionary (1903) was used. The research is made with the methods of component and contextual analysis. Relevant meanings of the words life, death from the material are compared with their dictionary meanings, the most frequent variants and relevant semes of meanings are investigated in the article. The analysis found the following language facts: 1. Many sentences show the word life and its derivatives in the expressions designating time or place (year of life, life period, life in Moscow, in St. Petersburg). 2. The words life and death are used as reference points to describe events and phenomena on the directed timeline. 3. The semantic excess expresses the author's understanding of the human existence limit. The author cannot speak about the dead in the same way as about the alive. Synonyms pokoynyy, pochivshyy, umershiy, usopshiy are used to focus on the fact that the person is dead. The above mentioned synonyms are semantically excessive. 4. The expressions meaning the inevitability of death and the irrevocability of it for any, even the most gifted, person underline the connection between time and life. 5. The continuum of life is many-sided. The movement of the person in this continuum can happen not only in one direction in time and in different directions in space, but also in different areas. The word life in Kashkin's Memories of P. I. Tchaikovsky means the existential continuum having one end - the death of the person. All events occur in this continuum, its various parts can be important to a greater or lesser extent for the person in different intervals of time. The lexeme life in the author's picture of the world is connotatively neutral. For Kashkin, the opposition life/death is generally expressed by the semantics of the words alive/dead, the antonyms life/death almost cannot be opposed as life is incomparably more important than death. This peculiarity is the essential feature of the idiostyle of Kashkin, reflecting his language picture of the world.

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