Specific features of the plot construction in V. Kataev’s stories “The Lonely Sail Is White” and “The Son of the Regiment”

Abstract

The article examines different options for the interaction of children’s literature and the literature of the large canon plot models in the works of Valentin Kataev. The object of the study is two of his stories: the first part of the tetralogy “Waves of the Black Sea” – “The Lonely Sail Is White” and “The Son of the Regiment”.

The first story is distinguished by a fairly obvious orientation towards the model of the Revolution conceptualization that developed at the turn of the 1910s and 1920s. The mystery model determines the nature of the plot construction, forming a certain internal plot, presented by the mythologemes of “Red Easter”/ “Working Easter” and “sails”. The mythologems are built along two storylines in the parallel development, at the end of the story they charge the ideological load of the traditional romantic image with a mysterious meaning.

The second story is characterized by its inclusion into the mythology of the “big family” being constructed at this stage. This is associated with a shift in a psychologically grounded plot action towards epicization, which is embodied in the accentuated archetypal component. The mythologeme of the “big family” is presented in the work in the context of ideological connotations common to the given time and is realized at all levels of the text: its plot, characters, images and chronotops. As a result, the nature of temporal conceptualization changes: the mysterious processuality of time gives way to temporal circularity.