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Abstract:

Viktor Astafyev and Evgeny Nosov are veteran writers who shared a long-term friendship, which was reflected in their correspondence. The hospital topos as a spatial object is realized in Astafyev’s novels “Starfall”, “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess”, “The Merry Soldier”, and Nosov’s short story “Red Wine of Victory”. The indication of real toponyms and exact time coordinates in the hospital image helps to create a credibility effect in the analyzed works. The hospital topos is revealed in the writers’ war prose as a unity of stable and changeable narrative plans, and allows us to identify the connection between the real-event level of the hospital image implementation and abstract levels (mental, cultural). Stable meanings form the semantic core of the topos, which represents binary oppositions: life / death (“Shepherd and Shepherdess”, “Red Wine of Victory”), good / evil (“Merry Soldier”), order / chaos (“Shepherd and Shepherdess”), injury / healing, and changeable, variable ones form its periphery, which allows them to be moved or changed when the cultural paradigm changes. Variable meanings are realized in the semantics of subtopics (medical battalion, sanitary train, “hospital kindergarten”, the territory of the “grove” turned into a field hospital), and correlate with the individual author’s optics and poetics: plot scheme, symbolism of the title (“Starfall”), genre synthesis (“Shepherd and Shepherdess”), intermediate strategies — musical and pictorial ekphrasis (“Starfall”, “Red Wine of Victory”).

Keywords: V. Astafyev, E. Nosov, novellas, short stories, hospital space, semantic core, ontology of death.