SOUND TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TEXT INTO GOGOL’S FANTASY WORLD (IN THE STORY OF N. V. GOGOL “THE NOSE”)

In the present article an attempt is made to fi nd out that sounds transform the text of N. V. Gogol’s story “The Nose” into Gogol’s fantasy world. In our opinion, in the story the word order, sound repetition, rhythm and verse meters are often built on the principle of “mirror refl ection”. For example, the opening sentence of the story “On the twentyfi fth of March an unusually strange thing happened in St. Petersburg” has a reverse word order, rearranged sounds and opposite verse meters, which are built according to the principle of mirror refl ection. This reverse order we shall call “horizontal replacement of words, sounds, and meters”. It can be associated with the strangeness and reversibility of the incident, i. e., with the transformation of the nose into an independent whole, which we will call the “vertical replacement of the hierarchical bottom to the top”.
On the other hand, vertical replacement is a distortion and reconstruction of topographic space, while horizontal replacement of sounds and words is a distortion and reconstruction of linear time, since in human speech sounds and words must run linearly in a certain sequence, but horizontal replacement distorts and reconstructs the linearity of time by rearranging sounds and words. In this sense, vertical and horizontal replacements can be associated with the warped and reconstructed space-time of the story “The Nose” itself, in which bread and a nose could converge into one point of space-time and into ambivalent one whole. Finally, the barber Ivan Yakovlevich pulled the nose out of the womb of the sacred bread. Thus, Gogol’s technique of vertical shifts of the hierarchical bottom to the top and horizontal shifts of words, sounds and meters, which is associated with the warped and reconstructed space-time of the story “The Nose”, transforms the text of the story into a world of inverse, fantasy and laughter.