Structural and compositional features of portrait description in the formation of a hero’s image

The article follows the principles of text linguistics and explores the role of structural and compositional characteristics of portrait description in shaping a hero’s image in a novel written by an artist. The analysis is based on the text of A. Romanova’s novel Canvas, Oil. As an example, the article examines the portrait description of one of the novel’s heroines - Anna Vadim (Chapter 4). The novelty of the approach lies in referencing art history literature and describing a prototypical model of a painted portrait, which serves as the foundation for the structural and compositional analysis of the portrait description. The article aims to identify the specific use of structural and compositional techniques in creating a hero’s image within a special type of portrait description. The following results were obtained. It is demonstrated that the artist-author, when crafting a portrait description, relies on the prototypical model of a painted portrait, which establishes a “portrait textual continuum” for each chapter and serves as the basis for the novel’s structural and compositional framework. In such texts, portrait description becomes a text-forming functional-semantic type of speech and serves as a means of shaping the hero’s image.