National-cultural and individual author's semantic components of the zoomorphic image “wolf” in the fables of Demyan Bedny and Ivan Batrak

The work is devoted to the study of the language of the fables of the Soviet satirists Demyan Bedny and Ivan Batrak. It is noted that in the fables of writers, various zoomorphic images are actively used, which contribute to exposing the social vices of modern reality to authors, as well as negative personality traits. The contextual semantics of the zoomorphic image “Wolf”, actively used in the fables of D. Bedny and the most frequent in comparison with other zoonyms in the texts of I. Batrak, is considered. The folklore origins of the pejorative appraisal of this zoomorphic image, in particular, Russian folk tales about animals, have been established.