The genre elements of western in «Altai» short stories by M. I. Veller

Altai as topos, possessing a certain set of semiotic and intertextual characteristics, is an important part of Russian literature. M. I. Veller has made his contribution to the formation of the image of Altai in the Russian literature. The «Altaian» stories of Veller «A horse for one run» (1983) and «We will not go to Ishtugol lake» (1988) can be more adequately understood through the prism of poetics and the aesthetics of the western, possessing a whole complex of genre semantic content signs (the term of J.-M. Scheffer), allusions and intertextual links referring to a western. Also, there are direct references to a western in the stories about cattle riders of Altai. For example, the name of one of the characters in the story «A horse for one run» is «Tolik-cowboy». The image of the cowboy also appears in the story «We will not go to the Ishtugol lake». The chronotope of the frontier is quite fully reproduced in the story «A horse for one haul». One of the semantic content features of the western genre, present in both stories and bringing them closer to the western, is the cattle ranching and drive. It is an additional genre content which creates a «local colour» in the stories. Another western-specific theme is building a civilised community. In the story «A horse for one run», it is represented through the initiation of the hero. The author of the paper considers that immediate influence not only on aesthetics and poetics but also on the plot elements of the story «The Horse for One Run» was rendered by the famous spa-ghetti-westerns of Italian film director S. Leone. The main character of the Veller’s story embodies the type of «bad» character inherited from the S. Leone’s movies. As a result, the author proposes to interpret the stories as a parable about how the man striving for freedom, comes to a desperate protest against the will of the state, a tragic attempt to take another step towards real freedom. The «Altai» stories of M. I. Veller saturated with allusions and intertextual rolls with literary and cinematographic texts of the western genre, reinterpreting and modifying them, introduce new aspects into the traditional image of Altai, formed in Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, thus opening up new perspectives, not only in studying the «Altai text», but also in geopoetics in general.

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