FUNCTIONS OF REMINISENCES IN CHRISTMAS STORIES OF MODERN RUSSIAN WRITERS (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF Yu. BUIDA AND D. BYKOV)

Abstract

The Little Match Girl by H.Ch. Andersen is a fairy tale that tells a tragic story about a child's death at Christmas night. Famous Russian authors Yu. Buida and D. Bykov have written stories with the same names (The Little Match Girl and The Little Match Girl Gives a Light). The authors deliberately used these names to show the relation with the famous work. In both stories, the action is set within the timeline defined by the canons of religious calendarial prose. There are miracles in the stories; the Christmas characters are archetypes, as they are kind, merciful and compassionate. The stories written by the contemporary authors are examples of a kind of a palimpsest. They show the socio-historical collisions and moral problems of the post-Soviet time. The article uses the comparative method which allows us to consider the types of characters, to find literary traditions and innovations in the prose of the writers. It is important to take an intertextual approach during (when) examining the stories. It helps identify and analyze how certain motifs and images relate in the 19th century literature and fiction texts of modern writers. This approach reveals the deep connection between the works and the texts of world and Russian literary classics.