“City vs village” opposition in Pavel Zasodimsky's Heartfelt stories

The article is the first attempt to analyze the poetics of Heartfelt Stories written by Pavel Zasodimsky. The novelty of the work arises from both the absence of studies on Heartfelt Stories and the relevance of the problem of the city and the urban text in modern scholarly reserach. The article examines the originality of city and village images in the works of a populist children’s writer and identifies the functions of the “city vs village” opposition in the artistic system of Heartfelt Stories using the comparative historical, typological, and mythopoetic methods. The study establishes that the writer condemns urban civilization and idealizes the village from the populist ideology perspective. The use of the archetypes of hell (in the image of city) and paradise (in the image of village) creates a symbolic and mythological subtext in the stories. An important technique for depicting urban space is defamiliarization, which reveals the negative aspects of urban civilization in the most obvious way. The article concludes that the “city vs village” opposition defines the author’s concept of the world and man in Heartfelt Stories.