The article considers the possibility to interpret motive and concept as two parallel ways of
pre-predicative matter of internal speech incarnation. Lev Vygotsky’s doctrine about thought and
word, which arose in the philosophical context of neo-Kantianism and dialectics peculiar to the
beginning of the 20th century, creates the possibility of such interpretation.
The primacy and substantiality of art’s content before its incarnation was recognized and declared
by such thinkers and poets of The Silver Age as Andrey Bely and Boris Pasternak. The
word “matter” itself was a working concept in the aesthetic reflections of Pasternak. In his own
work, invariant themes were embodied in both narrative and lyrical modality, and in the form of
reasoning. Generic boundaries, thus, shown their permeability and, therefore, a conventionality.
On the other hand, the adjacent status of artistic and theoretical ways of speech was realized
in the search of the formal school of poetics in 1920s. Boris Tomashevsky in his classical textbook
of poetics interpreted the “theme” as an atom of “matter”. In the status of thematic units,
that is, units of “matter” division, the scientist considered both the plot and the motive. With this,
he stated the possibility of two paths to dispose thematic elements: fabulous story based on causal-
temporal relationships, and without fable. On the second way, according to Tomashevsky, lyrical
works emerge, and it also generates dialectics of theoretical reasoning.
This allows to consider theoretical reasoning as a parallel method of organizing thematic material
– “matter”. Concepts are joined in the propositions exactly the same as the motives are
combined in the plots. Additional similarity of concepts and motives is created by the only systemic
way of their existence, established by such researchers as, on the one hand, Lev Vygotsky,
on the other, Vladimir Propp. So there is a prospect of parallel systematization of categories: motive,
concept, plot, proposition, and others related to them.
Reference to the experience of literature shows that the thematic elements of the matter can be
embodied both as concepts and as motives even within one work. The example is the “Word of
Law and Grace”, in which the themes of Law and Grace, first, are revealed in the conceptual
comparison, and secondly, are embodied in the images of Hagar and Sarah from the Old Testament.
So clearly appears concurrency of concepts and motives as ways of realization of thematic
“matter”.
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