The motive "coming back home" in A. Akhmatova's poetry of 1940

The image-bearing complex of the house as a model of the world is one of the central in Akhmatova’s poetic universe. The research is aimed at revealing regularities of functioning and evolution of this key mythologeme. The semantic functions of the image paradigm "coming back home" as a constituent of Akhmatova’s picture of the world are studied. A case study of one year (1940) in Akhmatova’s poetry shows how the motive of coming back home, as the metaphor of human existence between life and death and metaphor of the epoch’s doom and death, allows the poet to reconstruct the integral concept of being in the life-changinh epoch. The archetypical motive is regarded from the point of view of realization of the author’s position as an in-between state man, between life and death.