Transformation of the conceptual metaphor “Family is a fortress / a harbor”: from idyll to crisis (based on texts of 19th-century Russian prose)

Abstract

Introduction. Ideas about the family in Russian culture of the 19th century underwent major changes, which was clearly reflected in the literature of that time. However, the linguistic side of this process - in particular, how exactly the cross-cutting images and metaphors describing the family way of life changed - remains poorly studied. The paper is devoted to comparing the conceptual metaphors of the family in two iconic novels of Russian prose: War and Peace by L. Tolstoy and The Brothers Karamazov by F. Dostoevsky. The goal is to trace by what linguistic means the image of a refuge family is created in one author and a discord family in another, and to explain this shift in the cultural context. Materials and methods. The source material was the texts of these novels, as well as explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language to clarify the meanings of keywords. The theoretical basis of the work was the cognitive theory of metaphor, developed by J. Lakoff and M. Johnson, which considers metaphor not as a decoration of speech, but as a basic cognitive tool. The work used methods of continuous sampling of vocabulary related to family description, conceptual analysis of metaphorical models, and a comparative description of two types of language representation. Analysis. In Tolstoy’s novel, the family is consistently portrayed as a safe haven. This is expressed through vocabulary associated with protection and warmt, through verbs meaning care and preservation, as well as through turns emphasizing community. Here, the family space confronts the chaos of the outside world. Dostoevsky’s picture is exactly the opposite. His characters find themselves locked in family relationships that bring not peace, but suffering: the house turns into an arena of conflict, where the forces of alienation and enmity operate. This corresponds to words with a negative coloring (litigation, discord, humiliation, burden), the lack of generalizing names of the family as a whole and constant disputes instead of consent. Instead of the harbor metaphor, the image of a stumbling block works here. Results. The study showed that the transition from the Tolstoy idyllic family model to the Dostoevsky crisis model records serious shifts in the Russian public consciousness of the second half of the 19th century. The key parameters of the family image are changing: from a protected place, it turns into a source of threat; from the collective “we” disintegrates into isolated “I”; from the symbol of stability becomes a symbol of rupture and moral trial. Thus, the linguistic organization of the family concept of in classical literature serves as an accurate indicator of how traditional values gave way to reflection and the search for new foundations of being.