The Metaphor “Golden Bag” in “A Writer’s Diary” by F. M. Dostoevsky

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarity of artistic expression of the theme of money in “A Writer’s Diary” by F. M. Dostoevsky. The article indicates that Dostoevsky’s journalistic style is characterized by the use of metaphor as an artistic term that can accurately designate the phenomena of current reality and give them a social, cultural or philosophical interpretation. Such metaphorical concepts (“soil,” “earth,” “roots,” “golden age,” “golden bag,” etc.) in the writer’s journalism usually grow out of stable ideologemes, idioms or mythologemes universal for Russian culture, but acquire new meanings. The author of the article determines that the metaphor “golden bag” is used in those essays of “A Writer’s Diary” which discuss the problem of the cult of material goods, which penetrated all strata of Russian society of the 1870s. Dostoevsky, appealing to the well-known idiom “golden bag,” starts from its fixed definition of a “very rich man,” creates a metaphorical image of money, profit and greed, gaining power over modern man, then synonymously brings us closer to the idiom of the “golden calf,” which is not represented in “A Writer’s Diary.”