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Abstract: The article explicates mythopoetic expressive codes in the short story “Zorka’s song” by V. P. Astafiev (from the cycle “The Last Tribute”). It is the first attempt to consider the features of the embodiment of the solar-chthonic myth and its basic figurative-semantic coordinates in the artistic paradigm of a work of fiction. The study is based on the methodological principles of mythopoetic, structural-semantic, and systemic-comparative text analyses. The article reports that archaic layers of folk culture, both Slavic and global, found reflection in the mythologized reality of the short story. The worldview recreated in the work is based on the cosmogonic opposition Chaos – Cosmos, incarnated in the text through a number of symbolic and iconic details and allusions, through semantic connotations and semantic overtones generated by the key motif complexes associated with the images of the “zorka’s song”, “fog”, the Fokinskaya River, the Yenisei, as well as with the main characters of the story – the boy and his grandmother. The article provides a detailed interpretation of the semantics of the named natural images as invariant projections of the elements of the cosmogonic myth, which allows explaining their world-modeling functions in this work of fiction. Their semantic correlations with a number of archetypal motifs, especially significant in the Slavic and world spiritual tradition, are also exposed: with the mythologeme of speech / speaking as a demiurgic force, with the prototype of Mat Zemlya, with the chronotope of the boundary between the existential spheres of the universe, and with the ambivalence of the opposition of creation – destruction. Astafyev’s mythologemes of the “zorka’s song” and the Fokinskaya River, personifying the energies of the solar-chthonic balance necessary for existential harmony and stability of the universe, including the human world are the key ones in this associative-symbolic paradigm. An analysis of the parallels between this concept and the theory of “the basic myth” leads to the conclusion that according to Astafyev (in accordance with the experience of the people’s worldview and the logic of natural-cosmic existence among other things), the condition and source of the world’s harmony consists not in the victory of the Cosmos over Chaos, but in their balanced interaction – as a dialectic of the dynamic unity of opposing principles.

About the author(s) :

Guzel M. Ibatullina

Ufa University of Science and Technology,

Sterlitamak Branch (Sterlitamak, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9016-760X

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 03.04.2025; date of publication: 30.06.2025

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