image of a child

The article reveals the originality of the artistic embodiment of the image of the house in the novel Summer of the Lord by I. S. Shmelev, interpreted as the space of love, coming from the family and people around them. The house takes on the significance of a Temple and includes an image-symbol of Russia – the gracious world of God, forever lost in the world’s cataclysms.

This article examines the features of how the system of semantic oppositions of landscape images is objectifi ed in the stories about childhood by the writer of the Russian expatriate community Ivan Sergeevich Shmelev, created in 1906-1912. The research material constitutes the works The Sergeant, On Urgent Business, One Night, Gingerbread (the Doctor’s Story), Festive Heroes, Stars, Timid Silence, related to the pre-emigration period of the author’s ouevre.