Carnival Poetics of B. Vasilyev’s Story «Tomorrow Was the War»

Abstract

The article deals with such categories of carnivalization as a free familiar contact, eccentricity, profanation, carnival ambivalence, crowning, and debunking the carnival king. Taking these categories to the analysis of B. Vasilyev’s story «Tomorrow Was the War» into consideration allows not only to reveal the features of the carnival poetics of the work, but also to understand more deeply the atmos-phere of total Stalinist terror reigned in the country on the eve of the war. Turning to the theory of carnivalization helps to draw a conclusion about how heavy was the atmosphere of suspicion, informers, and unjustified repression created by the NKVD with the support ofthe state machine. B. Vasi-lyev makes the reader wonder whether the new world order that is being estab-lished can be considered better than the old one that has been swept away by the revolution. Thus, the main goal of the carnival is realized in the story–to turn inside out the usual ideas about the world as a reasonable hierarchical system, to turn the usual order of things upside down, to ridicule everything familiar and frozen, so that through denial, ridicule (symbolic death) to promote the re-vival and renewal of the world.