The prototype in A. Varlamov's novel "The Mental Wolf"

This article is devoted to the study of prototypes in the novel "The Mental Wolf", the images of which are made up of both fictional and real characters. The author brought them out under other names, but the prototypes are easy to guess: Pavel Matveyevich Legkobytov is Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin, Alexander Stepanovich Savely Krud is Green, and Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin is a "peasant/elder/wanderer". The intertextual connections between the biographies of the prototypes and the novel demonstrate the author's intention to recreate the reality that he could not depict within the framework of a documentary biographical narrative. The reader and researcher are given a unique opportunity to observe how artistic reality is born on the basis of the life material of historical figures, refracted in the author's mind. The author himself has repeatedly given the key to understanding the novel's intent in his interviews, saying that he was able to express through fictional characters what he did not express in the biographies of the prototypes. The following research methods are used in the article: comparative, hermeneutical, comparative-typological, descriptive. With the help of a systematic approach, an analytical study of the prototypes in the novel is provided. Despite the coincidence of the factual material, Varlamov establishes a distance between the characters depicted in the novel and their prototypes, gives them new names, places them in slightly different event contexts. Thus, an artistic world is created on the interweaving of fiction and real events. Relevance is seen in addressing one of the key problems of literary criticism based on the material of the work of a modern author. It is the biographies of prototypes that become the core on which fictional events are strung and which determines the storylines of fictional characters. By virtue of the above, biography is neither a framework component nor an autonomous genre, but it becomes a kind of paradigm for the plot structure of the novel. And already in this paradigm, each of the characters is free to express their ideas, to argue about the present and future of Russia, to observe the era of historical social upheavals and wars.

biography, The prototype, fiction, real events, Prishvin, Easy-going, Savely Krud, Alexander Green, guy, Rasputin