The fight with the dragon in “The Prince Archilabon’s Story”: literary sources, folk tradition and its modernization

This paper is concerned with reconstructing the reader’s experience of P. S. Orlov, which influenced his plan for The Prince Archilabon’s Story (1750), and analyzing the plot about fighting the dragon in this fiction in the aspect of modernization and resemantization of epic motifs. In episodes of the hero’s fight with the dragon and the adventures with the lions, the direct sources of the Story are the works of old tradition close to folklore forms - The Yeruslan Lazarevich’s Tale, The Brunzwick’s Tale, The Bova Prince’s Tale. Several details indicate that the author was familiar with the living epic tradition. The ethos of the protagonist and his horse in the episode of the heroic deed (the Dragon-Slayer) was rethought in P. S. Orlov’s Story. Unlike the epic model, the hero is encouraged to exploit the horse, the horse itself appears first as an instrument of providence, then as a comrade-in-arms subordinate to the hero, without anthropomorphic features, but spiritually connected with the owner. The epic opponent (dragon) retains external attributes in the Story (locus of habitat, appearance, course of the battle), in the course of the story, loses its chthonic essence (enemy and sink) and turns into the giver and potential assistant of the protagonist. After changing their usual location in the composition, separate epic motifs lose their initial semantics, while another group of epic motifs (falling a horse to its knees, driving a horse into the ground) is reinterpreted or gets an additional explanation.

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