Aesthetic meaning of a word in a literary text (based on the novel «A School for Fools» by Sasha Sokolov)

The article is devoted to understanding the essence and functional features of the aesthetic meaning of a word in the semantic system of a literary text. The research was carried out in line with the anthropological direction that is relevant in modern linguistics. The source of the factual material was Sasha Sokolov’s novel «A School for Fools». The focus is on the individual author’s components of the meaning of the word school in the title of the work. The main objectives of the study are to describe the methods of aesthetic enrichment of the word in question, to identify contextually determined combinatorial increments of meaning that underlie aesthetic meaning. The main research method is contextual analysis. In the process of determining the individual author’s components of meaning, the semantic-stylistic method is used. The result of the analysis was the identification of the semantic diversity of the word school, the determination of its conceptual significance and system-forming role in the novel by Sasha Sokolov. The study of the aesthetic meaning of this word was undertaken for the first time. As a result, it was concluded that the author of the novel plays on the phenomenon of polysemy, which is manifested in the actualization of semantic features inherent in different meanings of the polysemous and realized in the appropriate context. The result of this play is the formation of the aesthetic meaning of the word school. Important conditions for its occurrence are the author’s use of allusions and precedent texts, resort to various types of transfer of names, rethinking the connotative content of the word and updating its expressiveness. The study showed that analysis of aesthetic meaning of a word in the semantic system of a literary work requires turning to extra-textual information related to the writer’s biography, his worldview, genre preferences and individual stylistic manner.