Representation of Bacchic Worldview in a Literary Text

Wine drinking as a cultural phenomenon is becoming the subject of research in various sciences, such as art history, cultural studies, semiotics, philology, etc. The situation of wine drinking as a fragment of the semantics of the text is the subject of the linguopoetics of the text and linguoculturology. The purpose of this study is to consider the situation of wine drinking, its functioning in the world of a work of art. The material for the work is a selection of examples extracted from prose, from the second half of the XIX century to the present days. A wide time span allows us to trace understanding and interpretation of wine drinking situation in dynamics. The examples contain bacchic vocabulary, i.e. lexemes that have the meaning ‘to drink alcohol’. The relevance of the study is related to its entry into the circle of interpretive semantic research, in which the authors pay attention to features of both the idiosyncratic traits of the writer and universal, nationwide, inherent characteristics of the period of time. The main research methods are continuous sampling method for extracting illustrative material from literary works of writers that contain bacchic vocabulary; as well as semantic and descriptive methods. The main functions of the wine drinking situation in texts are, firstly, plot-modeling, promoting the narrative outline of the work; secondly, background, reproducing the historical and cultural background of the event line; thirdly, characterizing, defining the properties and qualities of a character described, a participant of the event. The paper also shows how the world of an artistic work reflects a historical and cultural period, the realities relevant to it, as well as the individual author’s arsenal of linguistic means, which is a representative of a subjective view and assessment. It is concluded that tracing the dynamics of the situation of wine drinking through the study of bacchic linguistic means makes it possible to determine the dominant in a particular period of time.