Chronotope and Metaphor as Ways of Time-Space Contextual Blending: the Principle of Relativity in Literature

This paper is an attempt to apply the holistic notion of chronotope suggested by Bakhtin to investigating literary style as a gestalt phenomenon. Style is a complex pattern of mutually reciprocal elements, and Bakhtin's chronotope was the first in literary analysis to link at least two elements – time and space – as complementary, i.e., as combined to enhance and emphasize each other qualities. The suggested analysis is a tool for deepening our understanding of Vladimir Nabokov's protagonists' actions via the time-space matrices they are acting in. The cognitive analytical instruments of analysis are the closely related holistic notions of chronotope and conceptual metaphor