Metaphorical actualization of literary image “Urfin Dzhus and his wooden soldiers” in Russian media

The article explores the metaphorical use of the literary image "Urfin Dzhus and his wooden soldiers" within contemporary Russian media discourse. Although Alexander Volkov's fairy tale enjoys widespread popularity among Russian readers, the metaphorical potential of concepts derived from this work remains insufficiently studied in media contexts. The study relies on metaphorical occurrences in 21st-century Russian media sources such as Argumenty i Fakty, Izvestia, Vedomosti, and Moskovsky Komsomolets. The research methodology is grounded in the cognitive-discursive paradigm, which treats metaphor as a cognitive mechanism facilitating content transfer via analogy between conceptual domains in extralinguistic contexts. The methods employed encompass conceptual feature analysis, metaphorical modeling, sampling, description, and classification. Findings reveal that the image of Urfin Dzhus's wooden soldiers is metaphorically actualized in Russian media through a diverse range of conceptual characteristics including "stupidity," "thoughtless performer," "large quantity," "rude athlete," "clumsiness," "poor vocabulary," "tireless people," "heartlessness," "inefficiency," "tall stature and baldness," "quick appearance," "manager-performers," and "controllability." Some of these features, used in metaphorical contexts, contain evaluative meanings embedded in the fairy tale by the Soviet writer. At the same time, the metaphorical meanings of the image in question arise not only as a result of projection between two conceptual spheres, but also from a complex interaction of mental and extralinguistic factors, that is, they represent emergent phenomena that are not fully deducible from the semantic components of the conceptual spheres involved.