Humanities & Social Sciences 7 (2015 8) 1443-1450 ~ ~ ~ УДК 82.09 Valentin Rasputin: “What is in a Word, What is Behind a Word” Natalia S. Tsvetova* St. Petersburg State University 26 1-st. line, St. Petersburg, 199053, Russia Received 07.05.2015, received in revised form 21.05.2015, accepted 07.06.2015 The article analyses the speech part of old Darya (story “Farewell to Matyora”) as a means of materialization of the ontological sense of national existence. <...> Introduction to the problem In the year 1987 in Irkutsk, the essays, sketches and interviews of Valentin Grigoryevich Rasputin were published under the title which united the problem expressed in all of them: “What is in a word, what is behind a word?” This is a key question for the literary philosophy of the writer, who revealed the secret of the “true and only” word (Rasputin, 1987, 156). <...> To our mind, in this aspect a special place in the literary biography of Rasputin is occupied by the novel “Farewell to Matyora” (1976) the critics © Siberian Federal University. <...> On the other hand, it makes us contemplate over the conceptual inexhaustibility of the text, evoking associations with ‘The Book of Revelation”, the most mysterious book in the history of humankind, prophesies of the last times, last days of the humankind and the man. “Farewell to Matyora” is a text comprised of symbolic pictures and philosophic dialogues, encompassing various meanings, developing, fi rst of all, the eschatological prospective, discovered due to Orthodox eschatological anthropology. <...> There is no coincidence that the story devoted to one of the global events of technocratic civilization, the plunge of a settlement with many Natalia S. Tsvetova. <...> Valentin Rasputin: “What is in a Word, What is Behind a Word” centuries’ history under water, presents a highly sophisticated series of protagonists, the core of which is the human, the person maintaining the eternal continuation of life, uniting all existence with the ideas of its unity inherited from the ancestors. <...> There is no coincidence that the writer, having a perfect command of multiple diverse descriptive techniques, who has numerously demonstrated his brilliant talent of a landscape descriptor, is concentrated on the picture of a protagonist performing a unique function in the story, which is the function of a communication agent. <...> To let old Darya fulfi l this complicated function in the plot, V. Rasputin, following <...>