Socio-psychological portrait of a group of Soviet military sailors in K. G. Paustovsky’s works about Sevastopol

Abstract

The aim of the study is to analyze some of K. G. Paustovsky’s documentary fiction works to identify the specifics of the writer’s individual style in the process of recreating socio-psychological portraits of a special group of his contemporaries, i.e., sailors of the Black Sea Fleet of the USSR in Sevastopol in the pre-war period (1930s-1940s). The study is original in that it is the first to reconstruct the portrait of a social group of Soviet military sailors as eclectic documentary and literary images in the navy during a specific historical period based on K. G. Paustovsky’s stories in the collections “The Black Sea”, “The Story of a Life”, and “Tales. Essays. Literary Portraits”. A philological analysis of various linguistic markers, psychological techniques used by the writer to understand the consciousness of military sailors, a complex set of emotions and feelings generated by the water element is given. As a result, it was found that in the process of reconstructing the socio-psychological portrait of a group of Soviet military sailors of the Black Sea Fleet of the USSR, K. G. Paustovsky uses various expressive means: synecdoche, the technique of combining the living and the non-living, zeugma, comparison, epithet, oxymoron. The writer assigns a special role to the symbolism of color, with the help of which he reveals the power of the heroes’ feelings and experiences, allowing for a deeper understanding of the psychology of military sailors.