꾸쁘린의 <석류석 팔찌> 일고찰 2: 하급관리 ‘젤뜨꼬프’의 어휘적 특성을 중심으로

A Review of Kuprin’s The Garnet Bracelet: Focused on Zheltkov’s Lexical Characteristics

In the story, The Garnet Bracelet, the character’s speech portrays the character’s distinct life experience, level of education, behavioral features, and manners. The features of the character’s speech complement the character’s portrait; it helps to understand his character and worldview. Availing himself of lexical and precise language, including dialecticisms, jargon, colloquial swearing, and low and high-style vocabulary, Kuprin forms an artistic image of the hero. Emotive and vivid vocabulary depicts a character's feelings, reactions, and sentimental life. The study scrutinizes the lexical decisions of the author Aleksandr Kuprin on the language used by a character Zheltkov, to build Zheltkov’s character traits in a short novel. The lexical and emotionally embellished word choices of Zheltkov’s speech promote the image of “little official” and his unusually touching and melancholy love, for which he harbored no desire. The uniqueness of Zheltkov’s speech resides in two particular techniques Kuprin utilizes. The use of expressive connotations in the semantic and polite forms, both in letters and dialogues, is of paramount importance in building Zheltkov’s character traits and image. Furthermore, the abundance of words with formal indicators of a bookish, high style (in particular, prefixes of bookish origin: pre-, vo-, voz-) is employed to build the character’s image as Kuprin’s intention. Hence, the monologue of the “little official” manifested Zheltkov’s great poetic soul, imbued by Kuprin. In the novel, despite the humiliation of Zheltkov’s social position, with such pure, affectionate, and ardent love, the adversity and social indignity are in vain. In general, with prudently utilized diction and techniques, Kuprin attempts to delineate the transformative power of love with Zheltkov’s character formation.