The guidelines for building up a theasaurus in the contemporary novel

In the article the major guidelines are laid out which were adopted by the research group working on the thesaurus of socio-cultural challenges and threats in the Russian contemporary novel (above 60 texts written in 2013-2018). Without prose fiction, as one of the fields of speech activity and novel as its major genre, one cannot hope to achieve a full-scale impression of how contemporary threats and challenges are responded in the modern mind. As the basis for the thesaurus, conceptualized as a dynamic structure representing relations and cognitive processes, the following model has been advanced in the research: patiens - agens - concept of threat - sphere of action - concept of overcoming. Two global challenges were found standing out among other threats as a condition sine qua non for the present day situation where all the threats and challenges are being formulated in the world influenced by GLOBALISM, and RADI- CALISM prevails in the manner both of threat and resistence. The exploration of the metaphoric language is a major objective for the thesaurus built up for the novel with a view to investigate what challenges and in what metaphoric expression provoke the most actual response in prose fiction. Alongside the symbols that can be traced back to the tradition as old as myth, there spring up new individual mataphors (ideo-mataphors) introduced for the particular novelistic plot. Metaphors reveal immediate speech reac- tions that lead beyond consciousness into the depth where ideas are being conceived and waves of cognitive processes roll on.