Cultural reminiscences in a literary text: content, cognitive and communicative aspects

The aim of the work is to analyze the significance of cultural reminiscences in literary texts for the modern language consciousness and to identify the factors that form this significance. The objectives of the study are to describe the composition (sources), cognitive properties, and communicative functions of cultural reminiscences in modern works of mass fiction — Russian-language fantasy. The article deals with cultural reminiscences based on the material of Olga Gromyko’s humorous fantasy. The article uses the methods of system, cognitive, structural and functional analysis. The authors adhere to the idea of the text-centricity of culture that is translated in the national corpus of texts. Now new channels of remote communication have been created, otherwise acting on sensory and attention. However, reading books remains the most important source of formation of linguistic and cultural competence of readers and a way of intergenerational transmission of values of both national and universal culture. At the same time, the draft concept of the national cultural canon in Russia limits the list of key works of literature to the geographical territory of origin and does not take into account the universal components that have organically entered the national culture as a result of historical intercultural communication. The text is a type of communication between the author and the reader, so the task of preserving culture actualizes the problem of understanding the cultural phenomena presented in the text by the modern reader. Understanding a text on a cognitive level depends on life experience. Reading resonates with the reader (listener) if there are recognizable situations in the text that evoke deep personal emotions. Empathy with the characters in the process of reading works of fiction leads to the fact that such works become significant for the language personality, and memories of them (reminiscences) work in the future as stimuli that cause certain emotions and associations (in psychology this is called «anchoring»). Subsequent life experience and the change of authorities naturally affect the understanding of the re-read text, finding images and ideas for new empathy in it. The precedent text, which causes a significant number of people to have certain regular associations with various aspects of life, is embedded as a conceptual, figurative, emotional-evaluative and verbal component in the naive picture of the world of native speakers of this language. Reminiscence is an intellectual action that results in a precedent text appearing in the text, giving the first one the status of intertextual. Cultural reminiscence is a type of reminiscence, a memory of any cultural sign. It is advisable to identify cultural reminiscences in all types of discourse where they can be. In the text, reminiscences perform the functions of compressing information, creating expression, appealing to the recipient’s linguistic creative thinking, and enhancing the effectiveness of impact. The authors propose the idea of creating an online dictionary of regular cultural reminiscences on all types of modern discourse, where such reminiscences are observed. Although the composition of precedent phenomena as part of the background knowledge of a language personality is formed throughout life, the most significant of them, as a rule, are associated with books and films emotionally perceived in childhood and adolescence, including works from the school literature program. Reminiscences of cultural phenomena in a literary text are considered as a special kind of language and cultural communication between the author and readers. Successful linguistic and cultural communication between the author and the reader of a literary text is a powerful source of emotional and cognitive resonance. Linguistic and cultural communication at the level of reminiscences is possible if there is a common background knowledge and if their value-based pragmatic parameters coincide. Since there are differences in the amounts of background knowledge among different generations of native speakers of the language and culture and the variability of the semantic interpretation of reminiscent cultural signs, authors and editors of literary texts are recommended to provide their publications with comments on intertextual phenomena based on cultural reminiscences. The importance of the author’s commentary on his own texts is determined by the fact that linguistic and cultural communication based on cultural reminiscences in a literary text contributes to the actualization and preservation of significant cultural signs and basic cultural meanings in the consciousness of the linguistic personality.