Ancient code of Asya Volodina’s novel The Protagonist

The aim of the article is to demonstrate the role of references to ancient texts in a contemporary generational novel. Asya Volodina is one of the representatives of the young generation of Russian authors - the “thirty-year-olds” (Millennials). The research novelty lies in the fact that it presents the first detailed analysis of Asya Volodina’s novel at the compositional, problem-thematic and motif-figurative levels. The relevance of the proposed topic is determined by the necessity of a complex analysis of the Russian “thirty-year-old” writers’ prose, which is claimed to express the voice of their generation. The article focuses on the connection between the contemporary prose and the ancient tradition presented through the analysis of the masked characters and their links with the epigraphs of the novel. The material for the study was Volodina’s novel The Protagonist and seven ancient tragedies that served as sources of quotes for the ten epigraphs of the novel. Nine “masks” in Volodina’s novel were analyzed sequentially to show how the epigraphs help to understand the images of nine “protagonists”. The research methodology included the intertextual method, the structural semiotic method, and the analysis of motifs. The main conclusions are related to the substantiation of the characteristic features of the Millenials’ prose: trauma, self-identity of the hero, literary intertextuality, moral and aesthetic criteria.