The Literary Phenomenon "New Folk Tales" in the System of Soviet Literature of the 1920s.

The aim of the article is to analyze the phenomenon of "new folk tales" that appeared during the literary process of the 1920s. The ideological discourse of the new power formed a conceptually meaningful category of a "new man in search for new ways of achieving universal happiness and well-being" that reflected the request for searching for different moral landmarks of the epoch. Seeking for such a landmark, the writers of the 1920s rethought archaic genres, and a fairy tale became the most demanded of all genres. It is a fairy tale that makes an attempt to harmonize the new, yet unsettled world through eternal moral landmarks that it contains. When researching the strategies of rethinking this genre, it is important to note that the writers of the 1920s created not only exclusively original literary fairy tales but "pseudofolklore" works ("fakelores") as if written by folk. Specific verbal features of the literary phenomenon "new folk tales" can be seen in each analyzed text, and eventually they form peculiar narrative poetics that unites all the collections the author presents in the article. Individual authorial strategies of the writers of the "second row" obeyed the collective idea of searching for people's happiness and reflected the philosophical and historical-literary discourse of the epoch of a new worldview. The works of the authors that are not widely known to the public but constitute the avant-garde of the new Soviet ideological model of the 1920s (A. Yakovlev, R. Akul'shin, N. Volkov, A. Balagin, N. Kamensky) were the material of the research. Comparative, typological, historical-cultural, receptive methods, as well as genre-stylistic and structural-semantic analysis, were used. The research shows that binary oppositions "old/new", "folk tale/reality", which constitute the worldview basis of the corpus of the analyzed texts together with key notions rethought by the authors (God, religion, happiness, collective, people), are widely included in Stepintsy and The End of an Old Fairy Tale by A. Yakovlev. In New Folk Tales by R. Akul'shin, the final system of perception of new ideological views as immanent to people's consciousness is formed. The accent on the formal features of a folk tale, folk tale semantics, elements of folk tales and colloquial expressions allow classifying Akul'shin's work as an attempt to create new folklore for a new man. In the article, the author makes a basic conclusion that ideologically evoked aspirations of Soviet power to form an image of a "new man" lead to the birth of the phenomenon of "new folk tales" during the literary process of the 1920s where archaic elements were combined with the newest linguistic and aesthetic material reflecting the flow of the epoch. Thus, the traditional religious and theocentric worldview is overcome yielding to a conceptual "new worldview" approved and supported by the masses and born in the literature of the 1920s through the adaption of the folk tale model to the forming reality.

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