Article

Name: The Short Novels «The Return of the Buddha» by Vsevolod Ivanov and «The End of a Small Man» by Leonid Leonov The paper represents an experience of a comparative-correlative investigation of literary phenomena in the aspect of a holistic approach to the s

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Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

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Abstract: The paper represents an experience of a comparative-correlative investigation of literary phenomena in the aspect of a holistic approach to the study of the creative behaviour and the creative destiny of the writers living at the same time and getting into different literary contacts with one another: in this instance attention is concentrated on the creative interaction of the two leading representatives of the literary process of the 1920s – Vsevolod Ivanov and Leonid Leonov. The objects of the immediate consideration are the two simultaneously published short novels – «The Return of the Buddha» by Vs. Ivanov and «The End of a Small Man» by L. Leonov that are devoted to the artistic incarnation of the image of the Revolution and have in many respects expressed the leading intentions of the creative search of the writers over the whole period of their careers of writers. The diversity of motif and plot intersections discovered in the texts of their novels as well as the profound orientation of their poetics on the intertextual and archetypal couterpoint make it possible to reveal both the similar aspects and inimitably peculiar features of their narrative structures, which most clearly stands out in the character of the subtextual contents of the compared works. One of the aims of the paper is to carry out a comparative-correlative inquiry into the creative quest of Vs. Ivanov and L. Leonov in the context of the social-historical and historic-literary realities of the 1920s.

Keywords: vsevolod ivanov, «the return of the buddha», leonid leonov, «the end of the small man», historical-literary context, correlative analysis, motif-plot intersections, subtext

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