The toposes "house", "road" ("path"), and "garden" in M. A. Kuzmin's novels "The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" and "Sir John Fairfax's Journey through Turkey and Other Notable Countries"

In this article, the subject of research are such toposes as "house", "road" ("path"), "garden", which are found in the novels of Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin. Two works by this author are taken as objects of analysis – the novels "The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" and "The Journey of Sir John Fairfax through Turkey and other notable countries." The purpose of the study is to identify the unique characteristics and functions of these toposes in the artistic spaces of M.A. Kuzmin's works. The author of the article outlines a range of tasks: to define the term topos, to identify its structural features, to substantiate the status of the spatial images under consideration within the framework of the topological concept, to determine the semantic content of the toposes "house", "road" ("path"), "garden", and also to determine their functions in the context of the works of M.A. Kuzmin.   The methodological tools consisted of structural-semiotic, mythological, and cultural-historical methods that made it possible to describe the structural and semantic features of the topoi "house", "road" ("path"), "garden", and their role at the real, perceptual, and conceptual levels of the artistic space. The novelty of the research lies in the use of a topological approach in the analysis of M.A. Kuzmin's works, with the condition of identifying the structure of each topos, establishing invariant-variant relationships between the elements of mental-semantic networks, and determining their functions. The study of novels in the aspect of typology reveals the specifics of the author's narrative, manifested in the depiction of life through a number of oppositions: oppositions of private and public space, family and social, recreation and work. These spaces, objectified in the studied toposes, form a complex system of relations, organize the integrity of the work; reveal the writer's concept, aspectual and subjective-modal features that form the writer's idiosyncrasy. The author of the article comes to the following conclusions. The theoretical basis of the study is the binary nature of the topos as a structural unit of the chronotope and a type of artistic image; the structure of the topos, which includes a network of loci and sub-loci; the change in the status of the lexeme (topos / locus) depending on the focus of its consideration. The toposes "house", "road" ("path"), and "garden" are the basic spatial images in the poetics of novels, representing the source of the most important archetypal myth-generating motifs for their plots, as well as the places where deep meanings unfold, perform the function of characterizing images, revealing a range of problems and the author's intention.

archetypal topos, universal category, spatial images, mythologeme, topos structure, changing the status of a token, binary nature, cultural code, axiological values, topological approach