A fantastic narrative and the problem of the genre in A. Pogorelsky's novel “The little black hen, or underground inhabitants”

Drawing on narratological analysis, the article attempts to identify genre and a narrative structure of A. Pogorelsky's work “The Little Black Hen, or the Underground People”. The narrative intrigue of a story and the type of narrator are discussed in detail. Two aspects of the work are highlighted: an internal one - concerning the hero's journey into the under-world and an external, framing aspect - concerning the moral test of Alyosha in the boarding house and the reformation of the boy. Both stories concerning the hero's life in the boarding house and his oneiric journey are organized in keeping with a cyclical narrative intrigue, but the inner narrative uses a mythological scheme, and the outer one uses a liminal one including not only the passage through a symbolic death, but also the transformation of the hero. The first scheme is based on the protostrategy of a legend (like a fairy tale), the second re-lies on the protostrategy of a parable. It is concluded that the work as a whole is a short novel (povest'); this genre has been explored by Russian writers since the first third of the 19th century. The short novel contains a pronounced assessment of the narrator and therefore can be called a didactic genre. A. Pogorelsky's merit lies not only with the fact that he was the first in Russia to adopt Hoffmann's tradition of romantic fiction, although the links between the works of Hoffmann and Pogorelsky are undeniable and are shown in the article on the comparative material of “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” and “The Little Black Hen...”; most importantly, Pogorelsky has mastered the constitutive principle of a romantic fantasy story - a borderline image of the world and a “readerly hesitation” (Tz. Todorov).