Abstract
Ethnopoetics is an integrative discipline in the humanities, whose main task is to study the national characteristics of specific literatures by appealing to semiotic elements of varying degrees of complexity - archetypes and archetypal motifs, concepts-sensibilities, cultural codes (from spatial to spiritual), and genre structures. All of the above units act as ethnopoetic constants - recurrent and retransmitted concepts that form national linguistic worldviews, manifested in a work of art as a semiotic field of a complex, palimpsestic nature. The purpose of this study is to analyze the ethnopoetic constants of Kazakhstani Russian-language artistic discourse from the point of view of their semiotic affiliation. Particular attention is paid to the consideration of the sensibility concept “EMSHAN” (“wormwood”) and its correlation with the archetypal complex “HOME.” The material for the study was the eponymous story (“poem in prose”) by M. Simashko, narratively organized as a sequence of events possessing the semiotic characteristics of consecutiveness, unity, irreversibility, transformativeness, and the subject’s crossing of the semiotic boundary. In the course of the study, we came to the conclusion that ethnopoetic constants are not only formants of the linguistic picture of the world of a particular ethnic group, but also serve as the substrate basis of the aesthetic whole. The taxonomic distribution of ethnopoetic constants is the perspective of this study.