Presentation of Image-Making of Anna Karenina

The article offers a brief analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s discursive strategy in constructing the image of Anna Karenina, with a focus on how the speech of characters and the narrator undergoes restructuring in the first part of the novel. Conclusions about the protagonist’s image are drawn through the lens of the name-word as both an expression of subjectivity and a structural element of the text. The image of Anna Karenina is interpreted as a linguistic-symbolic form of subjectivity that generates a text with new poetic semantics. The analysis demonstrates how, at the discursive level, the liberation of words occurs, including that of the novel’s title. It is shown that conventional linguistic and thematic correlations are disrupted in the process of discursive presentation and meaning-generation: the name “Anna Karenina” begins to correlate with concepts of beauty, assumes the grammatical gender of “woman- wife”, and metaphorically embodies a poetic image of femininity. The article emphasizes the meaning-generating function of such metaphorical words as “picture”, “husband”, “wheel”, and “ring”, which appear in Anna’s image on a metanarrative level. It becomes evident that the protagonist continually exceeds the boundaries of the role assigned to her: on the plot level, this is expressed in her desire to free herself from Karenin, while on the discursive level – in the revival of the flat image of “horror” through the poetic word of “beauty”. Thus, the purpose of the research is to reveal the role of figurative motifs and significant elements in the formation of this model and the way they interact in the poetic system of Tolstoy’s novel.