Yu.P. Kazakov's story “In your sleep you cried bitterly.”: poetics of the end of the final text

The problems of the article proceed from the hypothesis that the end of the final text is structurally and conceptually different from the way the finals are depicted in the works of the early and mature stages of the writer’s work. Yu. P. Kazakov’s story “In Your Sleep You Cried Bitterly.”, which became the last in his creative practice, accumulates the themes of his earlier texts, but embodies them in a different way. The final text, being a system based on the writer’s artistic tasks, combines “internal” (passing from text to text) and “external” (the plot of a certain story) themes. The “internal” and “external” themes, combining in the story “In Your Sleep You Cried Bitterly.”, contribute to the formulation of a plurality of finales - short conclusions about life derived from the entire creative biography, explicated in the text in the form of half-arguments, half-questions and dispersed throughout its space. In a similar, but more detailed form, the finale of the story is organized, completing its external theme and traditionally occupying the final position in the text. Built on the principle of ambivalence, the finale integrates the beginning and the end, the period of early childhood and the threshold situation of “near-death”. Such a narrator’s vision of the whole of life, characteristic of the final text, forms a consistent, non-hierarchical concept of life. The article analyzes the specific techniques of the poetics of “late” Yu. Kazakov, which organize the system of the finals of the story “In Your Sleep You Cried Bitterly.” at the compositional and ideological-thematic level and reveal the value dominants of the final text.