Keyword: «l.n. tolstoy»

Metaphor is a unique means of cognition of deep, invisible processes occurring in the human mind while comprehending and interpreting the surrounding reality. The cognition of the world occurs in the process of comparing new realities with already known objects or phenomena; the result of such comparisons is usually called the language picture of the world. This work is based on the study of metaphors in the artistic picture of the world of L.N. Tolstoy.

The investigation of the synesthesia metaphor of L.N. Tolstoy on the material of his novels Semejnoe schast`e, Anna Karenina and Krejcerova sonata is presented in this article. The mentioned works belong to the mature period of the writer’s oeuvre with a well-defined idiostyle. The primary synesthesia is described as a transfer of a sign of one type of perception to another and the secondary one – as a transfer of a sign of one of perception type to psychological experiences, emotions and feelings of a character.