The narrative structure of “Two captains” by V. Kaverin and “Treasure island” by R.L. Stevenson: towards the problem of tradition

This article deals with the reception of the creative work of R.L. Stevenson in V. Kaverin's works. It is demonstrated that for Kaverin, who throughout his writing career considered storytelling to be an important part of fiction, the key to rethinking this category is Stevenson's experience. An important condition that becomes the basis for comparing “Treasure Island” and “Two Captains” is not only their belonging to the same genre and even its invariant, a geographical novel of adventures, but also the use of the same narrative structure, the first-person narrative. It is revealed that in the construction of the narrative structure of his artistic text, Kaverin inherits the Stevenson principle of overlapping adult and boyish points of view. Throughout the story, the image of young Jim Hawkins emphasizes his courage and maturity, while the image of adult Sanya Grigoriev, on the contrary, is more boyish, youthful soul. The space of adventure plays an important role in the novels, it itself gives the boys' typical youth co-honouring not only the main characters but also secondary characters, for example, the doctor Ivan Ivanych and John Silver. The main characters are male characters, the world of adventures appears to the reader as a completely boyish one in the adventure space of both novels: even in “Two Captains”, despite the idea of a woman as a full-fledged participant in an adventure, Katya Tatarinova have not become a traveler or discoverer. It is shown that Kaverin, like Stevenson, manages to build up the accurate axiological system of the main characters, which smoothes out the inherent “Two Captains” saturation with sharp plot conflicts and allows to refer this novel to the category of “plot”, not “case”.