Representation the Image of Homeland in the Christmas Prose of the First Wave of the Russian Emigrant Writers (Nadezhda Taffy “Neighbor”, Yevgeny Gagarin “Trip to Christmas Eve”)

The article examines the peculiarities of the Christmas prose of the first wave of emigrant writers on the example of N. Taffy’s story “The Neighbor” and E. Gagarin’s story “A Trip to Christmas Eve”. While preserving the genre specificity of Christmas prose, the authors try to recreate the vanished world of the past, distant and ideal, to keep it in memory. The key image in this context is the image of Russia, which in N. Taffy’s story is revived from the details of everyday life, the peculiarities of Russian culture, perceived through the eyes of a little French boy. The author uses a non-diegetic narrator to shift the narrative to the point of view of a child, for whom contact with the “world of Russians” becomes a Christmas miracle prototype. In E. Gagarin’s story, the lost homeland emerges in a nostalgic plot about a trip to the family home lost in the snows of Arkhangelsk Province. The narrator’s memories of high school alternate with the author’s nostalgic and bitter digressions. The image of the mysterious homeland contrasts with the callous, pragmatic world of European philistines. In the analyzed texts, the boy’s role as a recipient of Russian culture is directly linked to the need to convey the richness of memories about the homeland. The images of the child and lost Russia embody the Other and a different way of life. In this way, Christmas stories written by the emigrant writers acquire additional emotional and philosophical depth, becoming not only literary works, but also a kind of “bridge” between the past and the present, connecting the lost pre-revolutionary Russia with the experience of emigration. For the writers, the genre of Christmas prose becomes not only a literary tradition, but also a form of preserving national identity.