Functions of sovietisms in American literary nonfiction discourse (based on N. Mailer’s book “Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery”)

The assassination of John F. Kennedy is known as the “murder of the century” and is firmly embedded not only in political and media discourse, but also in fiction, nonfiction and cinema. Literary nonfiction discourse is characterized by a special “hybrid nature”, which combines factography, on the one hand, and a high degree of emotional impact, on the other. In this regard, the authors of literary nonfiction texts often develop a special set of linguistic means that allow them to influence the recipient in the absence of an opportunity to turn to the aesthetic potential of artistic fiction. This paper studies the functions of sovietisms as a special layer of vocabulary in the literary nonfiction book “Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery” (1995) by N. Mailer. The classification of sovietisms is given according to the thematic principle and is based on their word-formation, semantic and stylistic features. We also analyze adaptation features of sovietisms when translated into English. The article concludes that the sovietisms, used in the speech utterances of numerous narrators, as well as in written documents related to Lee Harvey Oswald’s case, not only allow the author to convey the national and cultural features of the life in the Soviet Union, where Oswald spent several years before the assassination of Kennedy, but also act as “status” details. They are used to characterize the identities of witnesses and eyewitnesses who participated in the literary investigation conducted by N. Mailer.

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