Text-forming role of the category of time in Dino Buzzati's "The Tartar Steppe"

The aim of this research is to substantiate the text-forming role of the category of time in Dino Buzzati's novel "The Tartar Steppe". The article analyzes multi-level linguistic and speech devices representing the category of time and describes the relationship of its interdependence with the contextually variable and volume-pragmatic structure of the novel. Given that the work of Dino Buzzati, one of the leading Italian prose writers of the 20th century and a prominent representative of Italian existentialism, remains largely understudied in Russian-language academic discourse, the scientific novelty of this work is determined by the research material itself and lies in the fact that, for the first time from the perspective of modern linguistics, the specific properties of the category of time are revealed as a fundamental component of textual organization in the novel "The Tartar Steppe". As a result of the research, temporal nominators and temporal markers used to verbalize the category of time in the novel are described, the inseparability of spatio-temporal relations is established, the text-forming role of lexical, syntactic, and compositional repetitions is identified, the features of the functioning of retrospective and prospective shifts depending on the specificity of the contextually variable division of the novel are described, and, as a result of the analysis of the volume-pragmatic organization of the text, a tendency is established for the acceleration of fabular time due to the compression of discursive time.