«FUNCTIONS OF THE FEMALE PORTRAIT IN 19TH-CENTURY RUSSIAN PROSE: GRAMMATICAL AND LEXICAL MEANS OF CHARACTER CREATION»

This article examines the linguistic methods of embodying female characters in the literary heritage of such prominent 19th-century Russian prose writers as Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The author focuses on how the purposeful selection of specific lexical units and syntactic forms allows the portrait description to fulfill three essential functions: revealing a character’s disposition, conveying profound psychological states, and carrying a symbolic load within the overall narrative context. A key role is assigned to grammatical categories — primarily adjectives and participles. In the analyzed texts, these serve as the principal artistic tools through which a heroine’s appearance gains aesthetic completeness, rendering her a significant object of both authorial representation and reader perception.