“To the Man and the Horse – Perdition”: The Semiotics of Corporeali- ty in Vasily Belov’s Short Story “For Carriage”

Abstract

The article analyzes the semiotics of bodily deformations of the heroes of the story by Vasily Belov “For Carriage”. All male characters of the story are endowed with physical inferiority. The main character of the story, Senka Gruzdev, lost his right hand fingers in the war, and once in his youth, he licked an ax brought from the cold and left a half-tongue on that ax. Senka’s irreconcilable enemy – the brigadier Ilyukha – is one-eyed. As a result, a triad conceptually significant for the author arises: armless – tongueless – eyeless. The defective corporeality of the heroes is correlated with their defective spirituality, semi-faith. Belov very persistently and consistently draws parallels between people and animals in the text. In the story there are two representatives of the animal world with an indefinite gender identity: a rooster that has lost its crest and a horse Sparrow – half stallion half gelding. The masculine dignity of the main character of the story Senka Gruzdev is also metaphorically halved. Senka Gruzdev fails when he tries to demonstrate one hundred percent manifestation of masculinity. Senka usually speaks about himself in the third person. Psychologists and linguists noted that self-name from a third person is peculiar primarily to the speech of young children, as well as to adults who enter into communication with them. Senka was clearly stuck at the infantile stage of development; he does not have a sense of self as a full-fledged personality. The figure of Senka Gruzdeva is typical of the artistic world of Vasily Belov. The most famous hero of the writer is Ivan Afrikanovich from the story “A Habitual Affair” “himself sometimes as a small child”.