Different faces of the old man Hottabych: genre “adventure” of the plot (“The brass bottle” by F. Anstey, “Old man Hottabych” by L. Lagin, “The brass bottle of old man Hottabych” by S. Klado, “}{0tt@b)ch” by P. Tochilin)

This article will talk about one of the “mobile” eternal plots of world literature - the story of an old genie from a magic bottle - that arose in the 7th century and about and since then has lived in the cultural process, moving from “adult” literature to “children’s” and back. We will try to trace how, in the course of its formation, it was firmly entrenched in this or that literature; what characteristic details it was supplemented with, what features it retained, and what, on the contrary, it lost. In the course of the task, we will look at four works written by different authors at different times and addressed to the various audiences, namely: short-novels “The Brass Bottle” (1900) by F. Anstey (1900) and “Old Man Hottabych” (1938, 1953) by L. Lagin, the postmodern novel “The Brass Bottle of Old Man Hottabych” (2000) by S. Klado and the youth comedy “}{0ТТ@ БЬ)Ч” (2006) by P. Tochilin. As an additional task, we will try to identify external factors under the influence of which the plots of the stories have been formed. In the case of F. Anstey, this is the influence of Victorian pedagogy and the “science of fairy tales,” in the case of L. Lagin, this is the concept of the “novel of education of the Soviet era”, in the case of S. Klado, this is the poetics of postmodernism and a fragmented, “atomistic” world at the turn of the millennium. In all works the pulse of the epoch that has given birth to them is heard. At the same time, all of them contain factors that influenced not only the transition of the plot from one literature to another, but also the further tradition of the genre (as in the case of F. Anstey, who laid the foundations of the poetics of the “humorous” (or “hooligan”) fantasy).