On the Morbual Code of Russian Literature

The article aims at solving the problem of a theoretical substantiation of the term ‘morbual code. The object of the research was Russian literature of the 19th-21st centuries. On the basis of semiotic and linguocultural methods of analysis, the morbual code is considered and examined as one of the most ancient (universal) cultural codes reflecting the peculiarities of the national consciousness of the epoch under consideration. The main oppositions of the morbual code are identified: ‘health - disease’, ‘life - death’, ‘doctor -patient’. The analysis has shown that the same code units (images of doctor, illness, patient) have different forms of representation in literary texts of different eras, depending on changes in the cultural and/or scientific context. The article examines the relationship between the morbual code and medical discourse, identifies their overlapping areas and their differences. The article shows that the morbual code can be present both in works thematically or figuratively related to disease/medicine (in B. Pasteranak’s Doctor Zhivago, it is determined by the profession of the protagonist; in A. Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, by the main problem range and the location), and in texts not directly related to the image of the disease (in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the formation and development of the prison system is interpreted in metaphors of cancer: the author shows the onset, the rapid “spread of a tumor” and describes how “the archipelago metastasizes”). On the basis of E. Faryno’s definition of the code as the “consistency of the author’s choices”, the examples of how the morbual code is implemented on different text levels are analyzed, and the overlaps of the code with the basic cultural codes - somatic, spiritual, temporal, spatial, subject - are considered. Typical morbual loci are described; the main features of the temporal organization of texts associated with the image of the disease are identified. The morbual code is shown to have become the basis for identifying metatextual unities both in the works by different authors (for example, F. Dostoevsky, A. Chekhov, M. Bulgakov, M. Aldanov, V. Aksenov, E. Vodolazkin), and in the literature of a particular period of literary history as a whole. The study has made it possible to clarify the scope of the term and give it the following definition: the morbual code is a formal-meaningful unity, representing images and/or metaphorical projections of morbuality in literary texts. The variability in the use of this code depends on the individual poetics of the writer, on the social, political, ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic codes of the era.

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