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UDC 808.1-043.8/.9:81`24
https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.6-20.273
Lebedeva Ekaterina S.,
Senior Lecturer of the Foreign Languages
Teaching Theory Department
Lomonosov Moscow State University
e-mail: lebkaterina@gmail.com
Proshina Zoya G.,
Doctor of Philology, Professor, Professor of the
Foreign Languages Teaching Theory Department
Lomonosov Moscow State University
e-mail: proshinazoya@yandex.ru
The article discusses the literary creative works of the Russian-American author Olga Grushin in the framework of translingual and transcultural transformations typical of this author and her language. The author’s individual style has been influenced by two cultures — Russian, the home culture in which the author has grown and which she absorbed, and American culture in which Olga Grushin succeeded as a writer and whose language she uses in her creative writings. The goal of our research is to analyze linguistic features of Grushin’s short essays and book reviews written for international magazines. The research revealed that translingual and transcultural changes that the author has undergone are reflected not only in her fiction but also in other genres where the author’s creativity and imagination might be somewhat restricted. Grushin’s translingualism is evident on the lexical level, embracing words borrowed from Russian. The author introduces them into her English text in many ways. The syntax of her book reviews and essays is definitely different from that of her novels but its cultural traces and author’s individual features are retained: complex sentences with a variety of coordinate and subordinate clauses, numerous homogeneous parts of the sentence, participial phrases, attributes, and abundance of parallel constructions are typical of Grushin’s non-fiction writing. The structure of her language reveals the tradition of Russian classics, the love for expressive syntax that facilitates the author in creating a certain image and brings in thoughts and feelings shared by the author.
Keywords: translingual author, transcultural creativity, Olga Grushin, Russian-American literature, Russian loanwords, distinctive syntactic features, author’s individual style.
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