Ancient, Byzantine and Modern Archetypes of The Wizard of the Emerald City Fairy Tale by Alexander Volkov

The article aims to detect the structural analogy between the archetypes of the main characters of the fairy tale The Wizard of the Emerald City (the Russian version of Lyman Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) and the main historical and philosophical subjects of Ancient, Medieval and Modern European philosophies. Intertextual and structuralist analyses applied in this article to the texts of both fairy tales involve the identification of historical, psychological, mythological, aesthetical, mental and cultural archetypes and hidden allusions, which could be interpreted differently due to the specific "reading effects" within different cultures. Such an approach allows drawing conclusions regarding the different interpretations of the main archetypical images of the fairy tale in different cultural traditions. In this article, these are the traditions of the Soviet children's literature of the mid-twentieth century and the American novelistic fairy tale of the late nineteenth century. The article shows that the main characters of Volkov's reception of the American fairy tale tend toward the historical and philosophical archetypes of the ancient philosopher (Scarecrow), the Byzantine hermit (Tin Woodman), and the Modern European naturalist (Coward Lion); and their images can be interpreted within the context of the development of the history of philosophy. This is in contrast to the American prototype of the fairy tale: most researchers analyze its main characters in the sociopolitical context as collective images of the typical American farmer and worker, as well as the American military official of the early twentieth century. The authors of the article tried to apply the concept of intertextuality as a methodological approach to the study of the two versions of one of the most popular fairy tales of the twentieth century, considering Volkov's and Baum's texts as parts of more extensive intertexts manifested in different types of cultures. They also tried to look at the text of Volkov's fairy tale as at a modernist text, the meaning of which depends on the "reading effect" rather than on the author's intention and allows for quite unexpected structural analogies. The fairy tales by Volkov and Baum are arranged in such a way that no matter how small the problem is touched upon it inevitably implies social, psychological or even philosophical overtones. The authors tried to analyze the issue of unconscious citations as a hint to connect the modern texts to the classical ones, since both tales are full of hidden quotations, allusions, parodies, mythological associations, stylizations and other syntactic and aesthetic intertext tools and techniques that allow going far beyond the meaning of the main narration level.

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