Linguistic Portrait of the Protagonist in M. A. Bulgakov’s Cycle “A Young Doctor’s Notebook”

This article presents a description of the linguistic portrait of the main character in Mikhail Bulgakov’s cycle of short stories, “A Young Doctor’s Notebook”. It outlines the main characteristics of the concept, which form the basis for a systematic description of a generalized representative of a particular linguistic culture. The study identifies the structure of the linguistic portrait of the key character in the mentioned work, which is reduced to text-forming, socio-psychological, and multi-level linguistic components. Since the protagonist, due to genre conventions, is endowed with the function of narrator, his speech shapes the text-forming categories of chronotope, addressee, and subject of narration, and introduces the system of characters. The main linguistic and individual author’s artistic devices for realizing these categories in the text are described. The socio-psychological features of the main character’s image are presented in their linguistic and speech embodiment. Different levels of speech, acting as techniques for revealing various aspects of the hero’s personality, are identified. Particular attention is paid to the investigation of speech from the perspective of a layered linguistic analysis, where each component – lexical, morphological, syntactic, and stylistic – contributes to revealing the details of the image within the context of the categorical, ideological-artistic, and idiostylistic background of the work. Conclusions are drawn regarding the main functions of the main character’s linguistic portrait in the work.