Wonderful stones of the Soviet era in P.P. Bazhov's tales

Problem statement. This article analyzes the lytic component of P. P. Bazhov’s tales of the 1940s and proves that these tales continue the tradition laid down by the tales of the 1930s, in which malachite, copper emerald, and chrysolite were the main stones reflecting the specifics of mining life. The lytic discourse of new tales, in which the sun stone, the key-stone, the patient pebble appear, makes it possible to expand the understanding of both the ideological component of the tales and the mythopoetics of the writer’s fiction as a whole. The purpose of the article is to study the lytic component of Bazhov’s military and post-war tales, in which the contours of the future happy life of the Soviet people are visible through the image of both real and miraculous stones of the new era. Methodology. The article uses the methodology of cultural-historical, ideological-figurative, and symbolic-contextual analysis. Research results and conclusions. The article sequentially examines a number of stones that, in their appearance and in their symbolic properties, can claim the status of stones of the new Soviet era in the Urals. Among these stones we see both real-life stones (heliolite, golden topaz, and rhodonite), which in their appearance and in their symbolic lytic properties can claim the status of stones of the new Soviet era in the “Tales about Lenin”, and magical stones (key stone, patient pebble, and golden mountain blossom). The latter make it possible to assess the utopian potential of the happy future of the Soviet Urals, which from the point of view of the 1940s did not seem absolutely unattainable to Bazhov.