The conceptual opposition SILENCE – EMPTY TALK in the Artistic space of Zakhar Prilepin's novel "The Monastery": A cognitive and semantic aspect

The article is devoted to the study of the structural features and artistic functionality of the mental concepts SILENCE and EMPTY TALK, identifying the subframes that form synonymous paradigms with them and are included in their conceptual fields. The purpose of the research is to verify the truth of the hypothesis about the dynamism of the axiologically significant concept SILENCE for the spirituality of society, which formed a structured system based on the conceptual opposition of SILENCE and empty words; about the polyfunctionality of the opposition of SILENCE and empty words in the artistic space of the work. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time Zakhar Prilepin's novel "The Monastery" is studied from the point of view of the basic concept of SILENCE and its opposite, the concept of EMPTY TALK, in terms of cultural and historical development and mental characteristics of Russian society. The article analyzes the concept SILENCE, taking into account the entire complex of cognitive and mental features; the content of its primary meaning is revealed; the connotations of the poles of the stated antinomic opposition and its functions are analyzed. Based on the analysis carried out, the following results were obtained: the actual meaning of the concept SILENCE, which is semantically close to the concept REPENTANCE, considered as a means of achieving holiness, undergoes a semantic mutation, being transformed through historical connotations (the meaning of the word "silence" as an expression of pride or narrow-mindedness) into the opposition of EMPTY TALK (in the meaning of ideological propaganda). Since the novel "The Monastery" has a thematically unified cultural and historical situation associated with the structurally complex concept of SILENCE, organized as a set of hierarchically arranged and interacting metaphorical elements, the opposition of SILENCE and empty talk can be attributed to the frame structure. The conceptual opposition of SILENCE and EMPTY TALK is used by the writer to create a system of images and to form the main idea of the work related to the search for the causes of the spiritual crisis of Russian society at the beginning of the twentieth century.