The symbolism of color and sound in Yevgeny Zamyatin's short story "The Cave"

Color and sound effects are one of the important components of a work of art. They perform many functions: they create an emotional and psychological mood, organize the plot and composition, make the characterization of characters and images deeper, psychologically saturated, contribute to the production of associative connections, actualize problem-thematic and ideological-semantic complexes, and, finally, characterize as fully as possible the individual author's style and features of the author's poetics. The purpose of our research is to examine the color and sound images of the prose of Yevgeny Zamyatin on the example of the story "The Cave". The theoretical basis for this study is the work of N. Arnautova, as well as several works by Zamyatin scholars – E. Lyadova, K. Dyakova, and O. Sedova. The study focuses on Yevgeny Zamyatin's short story “The Cave.” In the story "The Cave", the achromatic scale (black, gray, dirty-white) creates an atmosphere of spiritual degradation, the "cave" existence of man and mourning. Special attention is drawn to the colors symbolizing death, illness, aggression (blue, purple, red). Blue is revealed as a symbol of stopped life, frostbite. Purple and red – as a sign of danger. The sound background is based on noises and the opposite silence. This increases the sense of anxiety, discomfort and doom experienced by the heroes against the background of the tragic events of the Petrograd winter of 1919-1920. The sound effects are contrasted with silence. It is shown as an active, oppressive force, symbolizing the final break with the world of the living. Text analysis shows how Zamyatin visualizes the characters' anxious state through dissonance, a dark palette of colors, repetitive sounds and silence. The story can be called a parable about regression to a primitive state, where the loss of spiritual values is marked through the spiritual degradation of the sensory perception of the characters' world. Together, the color and sound effects show a world filled with chaos. They convey the main themes of the story: loss, death and moral savagery. Sensory images add psychologism to the "Cave", they become an indicator of a mental catastrophe. Every detail reinforces the sense of tragedy that grows out of the everyday episode of the inhabitants of Petrograd.