Forms of expression national and cultural identity in the "The Tale of the Motherland" by B. K. Zaitsev

This article comprehensively analyses the poetics and themes of B. K. Zaytsev’s "Tale of the Motherland" (1938) within the historico-literary and cultural-philosophical contexts. Zaytsev’s essay is examined in close connection with the key ideas of writers and publicists of the Russian diaspora who reflected on the issue of preserving national consciousness abroad. "The Tale of the Motherland" by B. K. Zaytsev was written in honour of the 950th anniversary of the baptism of Rus’, the anniversary of the Motherland’s birth in Vladimir’s font. The work continued the genre-rhetorical tradition of "The Tale of Igor’s Campaign" and "The Tale of the Destruction of the Rus’ Land". It addressed contemporaries who, while living in foreign lands, needed moral guidelines and spiritual constants associated with Russia. The article aims to identify the forms and methods of artistic presentation of national cultural identity in B. K. Zaytsev’s "Tale of the Motherland" at different levels of text generation, i. e., from paradigmatic to syntagmatic ones. To achieve the goal, structural-semantic, cognitive, typological, and cultural-historical research methods were used. As a result, Zaytsev’s model of the phenomenology of the Motherland was determined. It includes the conceptual formulas "Motherland is a sanctuary", "Motherland is a home", "Motherland is a mother". All these semantic patterns are linguistically expressed in Zaitsev’s essay. The main marker of national cultural identity in the text of "The Tale of the Motherland" is not only allusions and reminiscences, but also specific lexical units. These included, for instance, the possessive pronoun svoi (English one’s own) which is semantically close to the adjectives rodnoi (English native) and osobennyi (English special). Thus B. K. Zaitsev’s essay develops a semantic paradigm that comprises the oppositions mestnyi/russkii (English local/ Russian) and vselenskii/vseobshchii (English universal/general).

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