Abstract:

The article proposes to apply the term "bilingual epigraph", considering "author-epigraph-narrative-reader" relationship in the poetics of the novel, preceded by numerous epigraphs from more than 80 languages over the world. Bilingual epigraphs are unique because they are able to develop new and nonlinear subtext associations. The intellectual reader that can value bilingual epigraph gets involved into manyleveled relations not only of the events portrayed, he also enters new cultural reality, where the bilingual epigraph becomes a key, an allusion. Epigraph together with a reader start to create new levels of reading, they both develop extra locuses within the artistic space of the work. Thus, bilingual epigraphs containing foreign-language elements, perform the function of reference (a footnote) developing hypertextual relationship. This article investigates the novel "The Gilded Age, a tale of today" (1873) by Mark Twain (S. Klemens) and Ch.D.Worren as one of the first works in which multiple bilingual epigrafs developed Hypertextual relations, in the modern sense of hypertext as a nonlinear narrative.

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