The literary character Karabas-Barabas as a metaphor in the Russian media discourse of the 21st century

The article deals with the metaphorical usage features of the onym Karabas-Barabas in the Russian media discourse of the 21st century. Despite the wide popularity of A. N. Tolstoy’s fairy tale among domestic readers, the metaphorical potential of the concepts associated with this work remains poorly studied in modern media discourse. The material for this study was metaphorical contexts from the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper (2015-2025). The research methodology is based on the postulates of the cognitive and discursive paradigm, which interprets metaphor as a cognitive mechanism for transferring content from the source domain to the target domain based on analogy in an extralinguistic context. The methods used are analysis of conceptual metaphor, metaphorical modeling, sampling, description, classification. As the analysis revealed, the image of Karabas-Barabas is widely in demand in the modern Russian media discourse, while this onym does not have one dominant meaning, easily guessed by readers, but represents a vague set of conceptual features that serve as a source of information for metaphorical transfer (“Puppeteer”, “Egoist”, “Producer”, “Theater Director”, “Fraudster”, “Rich”, “Dictator”, “Strict Trainer”, “Experienced Manager”, “Ineffective Manager”, “Independence”, “Master of the Castle”, “Owner of the Golden Key”, “A Kinder and Singing Person”). Unlike many other precedent names, the name Karabas-Barabas reveals axiological ambivalence in metaphorical contexts, that is, it can be used to bring directly opposite assessments. On the one hand, Karabas-Barabas is the name for an effective manager (positive assessment), on the other hand, for an ineffective leader (negative assessment). Similarly, Karabas-Barabas is metaphorically used to denote both successful producers who earn money (meliorative meaning) and selfish exploiters who strive to make a profit at any cost (pejorative meaning).