Two moments from Elena Shvartz’s prose: on the problem of contextual meanings

The article examines fragments from two prose works by Elena Schwartz, “Square of the Knights of Malta” and “Serbian Monastery”, both of which are included in the autofictional cycle “Literary Tours”. To correlate with Shvartsev’s fragments, similar moments are taken from several works from the play “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov, from the song “The Tale of Unfortunate Fairy-Tale Characters” by Vladimir Vysotsky, from the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from the song “You Gave Me Roses” by Diana Arbenina. Correlating segments from the texts of Elena Schwartz with similar segments from the named texts allows us to ultimately form contexts within which meanings are actualized that are present in the fragments under consideration, but deeply hidden, and therefore not always striking; these are meanings associated with the understanding of man’s position in the world as tragic, with the understanding of the world as the focus of tragedy both for each individual person and for humanity, and finally, with the feeling of the inevitable end both of the world and of man. These kinds of eschatological meanings, largely inherent in the lyrical poetry of Elena Schwartz, realized in her lyrical prose, can be considered decisive for Shvartsev’s artistic world and convey important facets of the author’s worldview. The general result of the consideration of the designated contexts should be the actualization in contexts formed on the basis of similarity of meanings that are hidden outside these contexts. As a result, texts participating in such contexts mutually enrich each other in terms of meaning.