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Abstract: The research object of this study includes S. D. Krzhizhanovsky’s language game word in the aspect of its generation, taking into account the initial communicative intention of the writer to foster active interaction between the literary text and the reader. In this regard, the problematic field of the paper is connected with the identification of the leading receptive strategies in Krzhizhanovsky’s novella “The Unbitten Elbow” (1927), which create a system of artistic techniques for involving the recipient in a dialogue with the language game text. In accordance with T. A. Gridina’s postulate of the essence of the language game text as a work of fiction in which language game performs the plot-forming and semantic functions, the novella is considered as a work that requires the recipient to decode the inherent meanings by identifying and interpreting the language game codes, characteristic of the writer’s idiostyle. The plot of the novella, which develops in a satirical vein, represents a fantastic implementation of the game-based transformation of the Russian precedent phrase “The elbow is close, but you can’t bite it,” (equivalent in its meaning to the English idiom “so near and yet so far”) which is included in the title. The author’s provocative strategy is based on the principle of “estrangement”. It deepens the associative content of the title of the work by triggering the reader’s presupposition, which includes “recognizing” the prototype of the language game word and decoding the metonymic transfer, which is based on Krzhizhanovsky’s characteristic method of personifying a part separated from the whole. The occasional-constructive strategy involves the creation of a nest of derivatives of the keyword-image, which organizes the artistic space of the novella, and which becomes the bearer of stereoscopic meanings in the plot projection of the text. The highlighted receptive strategies of the author represent the most productive methods of involving the reader in the process of decoding of the writer’s intention. In the artistic world of Krzhizhanovsky, these methods imply multidimensional interpretation based on the level of cultural and speech competence of the recipient. This study can serve a basis for experimental verification of the formulated suppositions, which presupposes correlation of the writer’s receptive strategies, setting the vector of the reader’s reception, and the strategies for decoding game-based implications, directly used by the recipient in the perception of the language game text.

About the author(s) :

Nadezhda S. Abramova

Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6478-7073

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 16.11. 2025; date of publication: 31.03.2026

References:

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