The temporal system of the Russian verb in E.G. Vodolazkin's novel "Chagin": functional-stylistic and corpus analysis

The subject of the study is the functioning of tense-aspect forms of the verb in E. G. Vodolazkin's novel "Chagin" in the context of their stylistic and narrative significance. The analysis covers the distribution of tense and aspect forms in the author's narrative and in the speech of characters, as well as their participation in structuring the chronotope, expressing modality, and subjective perspective. It examines the features of verbal strategies that reflect the cognitive organization of images: reflexivity, volitional orientation, directive, and mediative. Attention is given to the connection between grammatical category and narrative function, as well as the role of the tense-aspect system in shaping the writer's idiolect. The object of analysis is the novel as a linguistic and narrative whole in which the aspects and tenses of the verb serve not only a structural function but also a poetic-semantic one. The research is based on corpus methods (automatic morphological tagging, frequency and contextual analysis) and relies on the principles of systemic-functional linguistics and aspectology. The material consists of the complete text of the novel, processed using the pymorphy2 library. The novelty of the study lies in the description of the systemic relationship between the tense-aspect characteristics of verbs and types of narrative subjectivity in the material of a literary text viewed as a cohesive linguistic structure. Stable differences have been established in the tense-aspect strategies of characters that reflect their cognitive attitudes, speech behavior features, and modal functions within the narrative system. It is shown that the imperfective aspect in the past tense correlates with retrospective chronotopics, modeling a lasting background of memory and internal experience, while the perfective aspect performs the function of event marking, fixing the completeness of action and structural nodes of the narrative. The present tense is interpreted as a means of actualizing memory, creating the effect of "experienced" past and reducing the distance between the event and its subjective perception. The future tense is regarded as a grammatical indicator of intentionality, volitional orientation, and prospective vision of character speech. The method applied combines quantitative procedures with functional-contextual analysis, allowing for the tracing of the interaction between grammatical form, stylistic organization, and the poetics of the narrative in their interrelation.