Artistic functions of landscape in Alexander Grin's early prose (‘Reno island’)

This article explores the images of nature in Alexander Grin’s early works. The purpose of the study is to identify the semantic meanings and visual possibilities of the landscape in the prose written by Grin in the period from the late 1900s to the early 1910s. The material for analysis is Reno Island (1909), which is one of Grin’s representative prose works. Depiction of a landscape is one of the main means used by the writer to explore the themes permanently present in his reflections - those concerning ontological and social freedom of a person, and the boundaries of individual will; besides, through the depiction of landscapes Grin shows the character’s mentality. In our research we applied the hermeneutic approach to the text. First of all, this article attempts to explore the active role that landscape depiction plays in the plot development and structural composition. Secondly, it discusses the symbolic and autological content of nature depiction as a determinant that helps to shape the character’s romantic streak and to depict the characters’ psychological space, formed on the basis of his senses, confronting emotions, cognitive features, oneiric states, and ethical reactions. In particular, Grin employed the principle of polysensory composition in plots that describe psychological states of the hero when being in nature. Thirdly, the paper discusses how Turgenev’s tradition of describing nature developed in Grin's prose. Fourthly, our attention is focused on artistic techniques employed by Grin to verbally reproduce the existential states of nature and man: the poetics of color and light, metaphor, comparison, hyperbole, etc. It is concluded that images of nature are highly mythogenic and they are of great importance when a writer wants to show the significance of self-knowledge and to depict feelings of a hero when being close to nature.