The image of hunting in Mikhail Prishvin’s works in the light of the platonic tradition

The article examines the image of hunting in Mikhail Prishvin’s works and its interconnection with the fundamental ideas of Plato’s aesthetics. The relevance of the stated topic is determined by the search for new approaches to the study of the writer’s works and the need for a comprehensive study of the influence of the ancient tradition on Prishvin’s writing. The objective of the study was to investigate the reflection of images, ideas, and symbols of Platonism in Prishvin’s “hunting texts” in order to establish the motives of his referral to Platonic aesthetics and to identify the specifics of the representation of this ancient philosopher’s ideas in the semantic paradigm of the image of hunting. The main research methods were the intertextual, comparative, and motive-figurative analysis. The study revealed the image of hunting in different contexts and at the different levels of artistic representation - as a space of the soul and a metaphor for knowledge, creativity, love, and life itself. The article focuses on the polyphonism of Prishvin’s discourse, which combined different approaches to understanding the phenomenon of hunting - the traditional Russian hunting narrative, the refined aestheticism of the turn of the century, and the sustainable reception of Platonic thought, which had a vivid continuation in the literature of modernism. It was concluded that in Prishvin’s literary world picture the understanding of the hunting phenomenon as a specific lyrical space for the author’s reflection and a metaphor for creativity and the quest for eternal truths was the development of the Platonic tradition.