Textual realization of literary topochronos in Bernhard Schlink's short fictional prose

The present study deals with the problem of the space-time organization analysis of the literary work approached as a three-component system. The research is based on the employment of the principles of anthropocentric interpretation of linguistic phenomena, which are relevant to contemporary language studies, and on the interpretation of the term “topochronos” introduced by M. V. Nikitin (1997). The text is understood as a system consisting of three equal elements: the subject, the time, and the space. The author of the paper reviews all special aspects of the artistic time and space continuum in the short fictional prose of Bernhard Schlink and scrutinizes them in detail. The use of the examples from two collections of short stories written by Bernhard Schlink: “Flights of Love” (2000) and “Summer Lies” (2010) demonstrates how, according to the writer’s intention, the topochronos of the mentioned short stories stops accomplishing its only coordinating function by setting the time and space coordinates of the fictional world. Incorporating the subject category as a key element, the author of the paper concludes that the topochronos of the short fictional prose introduced by the modem German writer develops an obvious emotive-expressive representation. Such incorporation helps to generalize, using a particular set of linguistic means of expression, the complicated psychological processes of the characters’ mental world, which symbolizes their spiritual crisis and eventually their spiritual “rebirth”.