Peculiarities of the comic image of «little person» in the funny short stories of Arkadiy Averchenko

The article is devoted to the funny story and its special features as a principal line in the works of the short-story writer Arkadiy Averchenko. The central character of these novels is a «little person». Developing this theme, Averchenko, on the one hand, resumes the tradition that both Gogol and Chekhov started, and from the other hand finds new ways of opening the image of «little person» through the prism of laughter. The article investigates methods of forming the comic on multiple levels – on the level of language, composition and content.