Russian legends in the historical novelettes by M. Makarov

The article analyses the works by M. Makarov, one of the little-known Russian authors of the first third of the 19th century. There is an interest to the author’s works due to the controversy of the genre specificity of Russian prose of the 1830-s and the topicality of the Orthodox-oriented governmental way of thinking, which is expressed in his works. The collection “Stories from the Russian folk tales” targets folklore as the form of expression of the national spirit and ethics. The historical, toponymical and ethnogenetic legends of Vladimir, Novgorod, Ryazan and Moscow lands form the plot of the stories of the collection. At the poetic and stylistic levels the article reveals the correspondence of the analyzed stories to Karamzin’s model of a sentimental pre-Romantic novelette of the 1800-s. Its typological specificity consists in a broken plot line; in special attention to a person’s destiny; in the “Gothic anthropologism”, which asserts the unity of human morals of the past and of the present. The fictionalized plots of the legends in Makarov’s novelettes serve to accentuate the Orthodox-based spiritual guidelines and moral values of the nation. As a result, the undertaken study substantiates the special type of folklorism of Russian historical prose in the first third of the 19th century. The combination of the features of oral poetical and literary genres comprises its peculiarity.