V.O. Pelevin’s Colorative Semiotics (On the Example of the Novel “Mafusail’s Lamp or The Most Recent Battle of Chekists with Masons”)

The purpose of the study is to characterize the features of colorful imagery in V.O. Pelevin’s prose using the example of the novel “Methuselah’s Lamp, or the Most Recent Battle of the Chekists with the Masons”, which serves as an example of the writer’s late work. The authors of the article consider the category of color and light, referring to the cultural code of the novel’s key coloratives, and explore them through the prism of the theory of semiotic signs, where color becomes not just an attribute of the narrative structure, but becomes a special symbolic unit capable of transmitting cultural and historical experience. In the novel “Methuselah’s Lamp, or the Most Recent Battle of the Chekists with the Masons”, within the framework of the tradition of postmodern literature, there is a special artistic space consisting of three worlds in which the main characters exist in parallel: the real, the unreal, and the world reflected in their minds, a special unreal-real reality. Colorful imagery acts as the dominant construction in the description of the world into which the characters find themselves, being the result of an individual representation of the world. It also reflects an individual’s view of reality and forms a holistic perception of the artistic universe through a system of color symbols and associations. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that colorful imagery acts not only as a detail in the process of creating artistic realities, but also as an element bearing an internal cultural code that affects the reader’s creative imagination, his cultural, historical and artistic experience.