Nataliya M. Startseva

PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of the Chair of the Russian Language and Literature

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2021-3-97

Abstract. The article deals with the issues of perception of a literary text written in the first third of the 20th century by modern young readers, objective and subjective difficulties that arise when understanding and interpreting the language material. Linguistic and extralinguistic factors always determine the understanding of the text. If the author's thesaurus, as a way of presenting a linguistic picture of the surrounding world, differs too much from the reader's thesaurus, then the perception of the text becomes impossible. The modern young reader experiences a lack of background knowledge about the world, a lack of emotional repertoire, has many gaps in socio-cultural competence. This does not allow them to count on an adequate understanding of a literary text of high informative intensity, such as, for example, the story of I. A. Bunin "The Gentleman from San Francisco", as well as other works that make up the so-called national literary canon, which is the basis of a full-fledged education and upbringing of a modern cultured person. A modern linguistic and cultural commentary (built taking into account the basic level of the perceiving reader, with a focus on their capabilities in deciphering the author's ideas) can help to overcome the difficulties of understanding and interpreting a literary text. The article shows examples of such a comment to the text of the story by I. A. Bunin, which allows us to bring the text closer to today's young reader. The amount of information explaining each unit that makes it difficult to understand the text varies depending on the level of readiness of the receiving audience. Given that a person who has not received a secondary education may have a reading level below average (classification by N. S. Valgina) the comment should be detailed and thorough. This will allow us to get closer to the disclosure of the multidimensional and multilayered structural and semantic space of a literary text.
Keywords: language picture of the world, literary canon, linguistic and cultural commentary, literary text, textual and non-textual information, text decoding, thesaurus.

Full text of the article (PDF)

* The study was carried out within the framework of the state task of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation on the topic: "Formation of reading competencies in the conditions of digital information redundancy and deficit of emotional repertoire of students".

For citation: Startseva, NM 2021, ‘Artistic text and commentary to it (based on the material of the story by I. A. Bunin "The gentleman from San Francisco")’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 3 (7), pp. 97–105, https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2021-3-97 (in Russ.)

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