Image of war in Maurice Druon’s novels

Abstract

The study of this universal concept through the prism of the writer’s mind contributes to better understanding of human relationships’ principles in the modern world, as well as makes it possible to identify ways to develop certain moral values by means of an authorial word and literary figures. In spite of the numerous studies that have been undertaken to investigate the individual author’s concept, the questions on the prospects of its structuring with a view to identifying the author’s style remain somewhat debatable. The ambiguity of approaches to ways of language and speech representation of artistic concepts has defined the purpose of the present work as modeling the system of the literary figures of the war reflecting the particularities of the French writer’s style and his attitude to the social phenomenon being investigated. M. Druon’s novels the stories of which take place during the Second World War have been the object of the present research. The cognitive-semantic and contextual analysis has identified the concept’s figurative component features characteristic for the French writer’s artistic worldview. The authors determine the composition of the nominative field of the individual author’s «war» concept, analyze the contextual relevance of the linguistic means involved in the creation of the figurative component and describe implicit and explicit figurative features of the concept. Special attention is paid to discovering the specificity of Druon’s writing style characterized by the prevalence of metaphors, comparisons and abstract symbols. The results of the research are significant from the point of view of mastering the expressive means of the French language for their use in cross-cultural communication when expressing a specific ideological position.