The story ‘The old teacher’ by V. S. Grossman: an analysis of the motivic and lexical organization of the text

The article is devoted to an analysis of the lexical structure and the system of characters in the text of V. S. Grossman’s short story The Old Teacher. The author of the paper looks at this text in the context of works of Russian literature dealing with the Holocaust. The study examines the lexical means used to create the images of the key characters, the main one of which is an old mathematics teacher living in a city besieged by the Nazis. The author comes to a conclusion that the main compositional-and-stylistic principle in the work under study is opposition, the selection of linguistic material is determined by the oppositions light/darkness, youth/old age, life/death; the main character is depicted with the use of antithesis as he is shown in comparison with and in opposition to other characters. There is a motive of fear in the story, realized through active lexical and derivational repetition of words and phrases with a pronounced seme of fear, which allows us to consider the motive conceptually significant. Through an analysis of text dominants, the study identifies important personality traits of key characters, determines realities that are conceptually significant for the writer’s artistic world. The semantic opposition life/death and the opposition light/darkness, associated with the former, determine the choice of means for depicting objects of opposition; the main one of such means is metaphorization. The article discusses the functions that metaphors perform in the text of the story (pictorial, cognitive, prospective). The analysis identified a lexico-semantic group of words with the common component ‘time’ that are repeated during the characterization of the characters as well as at the beginning and at the end of the text, which indicates significance of this concept for the artistic space of the work. The main character conveys the image of a righteous man, so characteristic of the traditions of Russian literature.