"Life" and "death" in J. R. R. Tolkien's short story "Leaf by Niggle": linguistic representation of the concepts and peculiarities of their conveyance into Russian

The article considers the linguistic representation of the concepts "Life" and "Death" in the text of J. R. R. Tolkien's short story Leaf by Niggle, in particular the cognitive metaphors representing the given concepts. Studies of how different notions are conceptualized in the language are a perspective way to understand the basic mechanisms which lie deep within any language. One of the ways these mechanisms can be revealed is through analysis of cognitive metaphors in the language. In the process of text interpretation, it is important to render conceptual information correctly into another language. The basic concepts "Life" and "Death" play one of the central roles in many literary works by J. R. R. Tolkien, including his fundamental novel, and they are especially well rendered in the story under analysis. When the words making up these concepts in a fictional work are determined, we can get an insight into deeper linguistic structures underlying the outer language form. The main conceptual metaphor which represents the concept "Life" is "LIFE IS A TREE". Tree is a symbol of life in many cultures and religions, and in the text it is represented by numerous collocations. In the text of the story, the Tree in the picture is represented as living and serves metaphorical representation of its creator's life. Also, it is the symbol of prevalence of life over death. Death is represented in the text of the story through the conceptual metaphor "DEATH IS TRAVEL", which is also archetypical for many cultures. The metaphor has several defining characteristics, which are mainly negative. We also conduct a comparative analysis of the English text and several of its most well-known translations into Russian in order to reveal differences in the representation of the above-mentioned concepts in the original text and in these translations.