"What People at Our Place Used to Be Condemned to Penal Servitude for": criminal plot in Nikolai Leskov's early prose

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the topical problem of the interaction of mass and "elite" literature on the material of Nikolai Leskov's early prose. The material for the analysis are the little-known stories of the writer "The Drought" (1862) and "Taunt" (1863), which are considered in the context of the writer's early work as a whole. Using modern text analysis techniques, the author explores the problematics and poetics of Nikolai Leskov's fi ctional works, analyses current issues of organising a dialogue with the reader by the writer, identifi es narrative and language ways of enhancing reader's attention. The result of the analysis is the concretisation of the ideas about the problematics and poetics of the author's early prose, who begins his diffi cult journey in the "big" literature, the mechanisms of intertextual enrichment of the writer's writings, and the peculiarities of the author’s receptive strategies. The analysis of the stories "The Drought" and "Taunt" in the article shows that the writer's mastering of the mass reading literary "canon" began with his fi rst fi ction experiments and was characterised by creative processing of the "entertaining" literature clichés.