Dominant spatial images of "home" and "road" in A. Zhid's novella "Immoralist"

The subject of research in this article is the dominant spatial images of "home" and "road." The object of the research is André Gide's novella "Immoralist." The aim of the work is to justify the status of "home" and "road" as dominant spatial images, to identify their relationship, and to determine and explicate their structural fields. The authors of the article outline a range of tasks: to explore the deeper meanings and archetypical values behind the lexical exponents of the spatial dominants "road" and "home"; to study the mythopoetic images that are part of the network of dominant topos, objectifying their meanings; to establish the peculiarity of projecting the principle of sacredness onto the topological model of the novella; to determine the relationships between the topos "home" and "road" in the spatial organization of the work; to identify ideologically significant binary oppositions represented by the topos; and to define the role of the stated dominants in the novella. The methodological tools consisted of structural-semiotic, mythological, and cultural-historical methods, which allowed for the description of the structural and semantic features of the topos "home" and "road." The novelty of the research lies in the fact that a topological approach to the analysis of the novella "Immoralist" is being implemented for the first time. The result of the work is a topological model of the work, including branched lexical-semantic paradigms of the identified dominants. The authors of the article come to the following conclusions: the topos "home" and "road" are dominant; the archetypical image of "home" is conceptualized as a moral value core, a criterion of self-identification based on the distinction between one's own/foreign, moral/immoral; "home" in the plane of heterotopia reveals the topos of the "heavenly home," objectifying through the mythologemes of "garden," "star," "sun," and "moon"; the motif of boundary, associated with the topos "home" and its loci, includes the idea of simultaneous isolation and permeability of space; the archetype "road," developing in a circular trajectory in both horizontal and vertical planes, denotes the metaphor of the evolution of the soul and spirit of the main character; the mythologema "desert," serving as a mediator between the fields of "home" and "road," amplifies the motif of trial and moral choice; through the inclusion of intertextual connections, biblical allusions, and reminiscences, the author presents numerous connotations of the topos, which include mythologemes characterized by semantic ambiguity and polyvalence; the dominant images of "home" and "road" allow the author to highlight the problem of immorality and the philosophical-moral dialogue based on the confrontation between traditional moral views and a new, Nietzschean worldview.