Linguistic innovations in Romain Gary's creative laboratory

Abstract

In this article we study a new background revealed due to Russian translations made by N. Mavlevich in 2015 of the first unpublished novel by Romain Gary, holder of the two Prix Goncourt prizes for his novels The Roots of Heaven (Les Racines du ciel) and The Life Before Us (La vie devant soi) published under the pseudonym Emile Ajar. The empirical writer mentioned about his debut novel in the book The Night is Calm (La nuit sera calme) and his posthumous literary essay The Life and Death of Emil Ajar (Vie et mort d'Emile Ajar) thus giving a clue to understanding of his “creative laboratory” related to phenomenal literary mystification. We assume that language experts will be interested in studying of Romain Gary's linguistic biography who created his novels in English and French, because Russia was the country where his linguistic development had started. By understanding the role and place of the author's creative laboratory in linguistics we can define relevance and academic novelty of suggested study. The study allows to analyze Romain Gary's creative works from a new perspective and goes beyond the existing method of obtaining knowledge. The main research objects include the author's language and linguistic behavior of his characters that are featured with well-structured images evoked by Russian words kept in mind from childhood. This system of values is close to the Russian readers and is in tune with the spirit of the modern age. This aspect in the framework of the language-specific nature can be a subject for further research. Linguistic findings made by Romain Gary facilitated the development of the literary language and were focused on increasing of capabilities of the literary speech. Analysis of linguistic innovations in the Romain Gary's creative laboratory allows to receive important information about peculiarities of links between the cognitive and linguistic content discovered in linguistic facts and speech phenomena and make some crucial observations.