The face as a metaphor of discourse transformation in Turgenev's “First love”

The paper uses a discourse approach to Ivan Turgenev’s short story “First Love”. Based on the narrative structure, a key metaphor of face is singled out, and it is related to the main theme of the story - a reflection of love. Through metaphor, written discourse allows us to trace those underlying layers of meaning generation, as they are not demonstrated in oral story telling. The need for detailed descriptions of the main events of life leads to the understanding of it. In the short story, the main female charac-132 ter’s face becomes a plot-generating and metaphorical factor that should be recognized and understood. The window through which the face is reflected and shown, becomes a symbolic borderline, a mediator between the two worlds, and therefore performs a special poetic function in the story. Moreover, the window, framing the face, becomes a discursive “objectivation” of “the oral story in the written story”. Thus, the analysis first traces the motif-repeating occurrences of the “face” and the “window” in the text, and then goes to emphasize how new signs are formed and how during this process the face becomes the metaphor of discourse. A romantic crisis of the main male character is tem-plated by the narrator, and in the act of writing a text entity is created by the text subject that demonstrates its genesis. “First love” is not a “poteskha” (an amusement), as it is predicted at the beginning of the story-telling (see the frame), but on the one hand, it is the central event of life, followed by death, and on the other hand, it is the motivation of written verbalisation. The only way to terminate the death is text-processing, which exposes the ideologies and concepts, and reveal new meanings, in particular, about the main theme of the short story in question - love.