SEMANTICS OF THE TITLE OF ROMAN MALINOVSKY’S STORY «TWO MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT»

The article is devoted to the study of such an element of paratext as a title. The object of the study is the story of the modern Ukrainian writer Roman Malinovsky “Two minutes before midnight”. It was published in the book “Sweet Life” in 2021, and it reflected the author’s consciousness of the danger to the life of mankind that the weapon carries. The purpose of the article is to reveal the meanings of the story’s title, to substantiate its representative, textforming role, to determine how the title helps to understand the author’s concept of reality, embodied in the work. To achieve the goal, the vocabulary (sun, wind, stars) included in the semantic field “space objects” was analyzed. The position is substantiated that the key role in the story is played by the image of the stars, this is the dominant component of the semantic field, closest to the core. The direct meaning of this word (what is seen in the night sky) and its metaphorical meanings are highlighted: a) space object; b) a cigarette light during a friendly meeting; c) the wreckages of burning satellites; d) flashes of nuclear missiles. The thesis is substantiated that the motif that appears at the beginning of the work is the expectation of an unusual cosmic phenomenon – fall of stares, with which the aesthetic (enjoyment of their beauty) is associated, as well as the hope that the wishes come true, is replaced at the end of the work by a statement of the launch of rockets that bring death people, including those who gathered to enjoy the view of the stars and hoped for a happy future. As a result, such semantic oppositions were indicated in the description of the picture of approaching to night (the key word in the title of the story) and in the semantic field “signs of the Space”: “day - night”, “present - future”, “life - death”, “beautiful – disgraceful, unhumane”, “space – chaos”. Attention is drawn to the fact that the vector in the description of what is happening is: from a variety of colors - to plunging the world into darkness, from light - to its dispersion. Hence the dominance of the semantics of extinction, approaching death. As a result, the interpretation of the night as a boundary between existence and its loss is proposed. The conclusion is made about the main meaning of the title of the whole work: two minutes before night - what happened two minutes before the death of mankind.