COLORISTIC SPACE OF NOVEL “OUR HEART” BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT

Abstract

The article reveals the repertoire and analyzes the artistic functions of color images in the problematics and poetics in the novel “Our Heart” by G. de Maupassant (1890). It is established that the extraordinary concentration of images of the visual series is explained by the orientation to the visual perception of the world, and the “impressionism” of the writing is an expressive means of creating the profound psychologism of his later works. An extensive palette of colorful images is an artistic form of embodying the existential problematics of the novel “Our Heart” by G. de Maupassant (the internal conflict of an individual, who is unable to use his creative potential, to make a choice in favor of sincere feelings). The color repertoire of the novel is dominated by chromatic (sky blue (blue), green, yellow (golden), orange, ginger, red) and achromatic (white, grey (silver) and black) colors, as well as their various combinations, often contrasting. Almost all coloremes in the novel have ambivalent semantics depending on the context. Orange, ginger and red colors in the novel are multi-functional, they can acquire both positive and negative connotations (they color the main character’s hair and the images of flame and hearth are correlated with them). In a positive sense, the “flame” is associated with sincere love and real life, opposes the dead, false existence on the “gloomy” earth and illuminates the “dark evening”. The color of the red flame in its negative aspect corresponds to the destructive love passion that “burns the character”, the color of blood and bloody wound that his heart turned into is metonymically associated with it. The blue color, by association with the colors of the sky, acquires a spatial meaning in the novel, symbolizing the characters’” flight? to the peak of their feelings. The images of lightning (blue sky, bright sunlight or artificial electric light, darkness, gloom, fog, twilight) together with their color counterparts (sky blue (blue), golden (yellow), white, silver (grey), black)) are also artistically represented in the leading aspects of the novel’s problematics and fix the dynamics of the protagonists’ feelings. In the system of visual means of the novel, the image of a mirror also functions both as an objective attribute as well as a symbol of the self-awareness of the characters, a sign of selfidentification and a reflection of the truth about oneself, which consciousness does not recognize.