The chronotope of threat and its metaphorical expression in the Russian intellectual prose of the 21st century

The article summarizes the results of the research for the multi-disciplinary project carried out by RSUH and dedicated to the problems of sociocultural threats and challenges to the modern society as well as the threats and challenges in the modern Russian intellectual prose of the last two decades. From the point of view of literary criticism threats and challenges should be regarded as the range of vital problems raised by the novelists and expressed by the key metaphors of the novels. In the first section of the article (“The paradox of modern perception: the author and the hero in the world after trauma”, by Elena Lutsenko) the researcher focuses on three modern novels (“The zone of flooding” by R. Senchin, “The long jump” by O. Slavnikova and “Laurus” by E. Vodolazkin). Despite the differences in the social problematics that forms the outer layer of the narration (an ecological catastrophe, the difficulties of people with special needs, social problems of medieval Russian cities) typological comparison is still relevant due to the mutual problematics of the inner layer of narration, expressed by the range of traditional oppositions of value transformed by modern mind. The abovementioned change in the perception of values reflects the paradox of modern mind connected with the physics of a person after the trauma; the paradox reveals itself in all three novels notwithstanding the difference in chronotope and in the genre. The second section of the article (“The illustrative and the cognitive metaphor in the modern novel” by Elena Pogorelaya) analyses essential threats of modernity in the context of their metaphorical creation. The illustrative metaphors in the novels by E. Verkin, A. Gelasimov allow to document the image of a threat whereas the cognitive metaphors in the novels by A. Ivanov, K. Buksha, M. Gigolashvili help to mark out the ways to cope with these threats.