Floral symbolism in A. I. Kuprin’s novel “The Wheel of Time”

The study aims to determine the semiotic potential of florisms in A. I. Kuprin’s novel “The Wheel of Time”. The article examines the semantic load of the work’s key floral images – acacia, violet, rose, and mignonette – and demonstrates their role in the artistic structure of the text. The scientific originality lies in the fact that the novel’s floral world is explored for the first time, providing a decoding of the implicit meanings of the primary plant images. The article analyzes numerous sources that shape the semantic field of these floral images: mythological and archetypal (the “blue flower” and “flower-woman” archetypes); literary (Blok’s “Carmen” poetic cycle, the poems “In the Restaurant” and “The Stranger”, the long poem “The Night Violet”, and Mérimée’s novella “Carmen”); biographical (A. Blok and L. Andreeva-Delmas); and cultural (Christian connotations, Spanish culture, and the tradition of “Carmen” opera productions). Furthermore, the interpretation of floral symbolism is conducted with reference to Kuprin’s other works (the device of auto-intertextuality). The study reveals that phytonyms and floronyms are used not merely as descriptive elements but serve as instruments of “game poetics”, facilitating a dialogue between the author and his own or “external” texts and cultural artifacts to form unique floral images. In the novel, these images are structurally complex: in addition to traditional meanings and references to recognizable cultural and literary codes, they create a precedent for a unique writerly “floropoetics”. Kuprin’s floral images are highly suggestive and polysemantic; their analysis allows for a conclusion regarding the semantic density of the text.