The Steppe as a Frontier in A.V. Kalinin’s Novel “The Gypsy”

The frontier in modern scientifi c understanding is a territory of meeting and interaction of various cultures and social traditions. Such a territory in the novel “Gypsy” by the Don writer A. Kalinin is the steppe. The Don steppe has always been a place of contact and clash of peoples and was called the Wild Field. This is a free, wild, as opposed to a homely, developed, space inhabited by people belonging to the exotic ethnic groups or possessing the exotic lifestyles. These characteristics of the steppe are refl ected in the South Russian folklore, where the steppe is not just a place of action, but an artistic space, the structure of which includes a strictly defi ned range of characters, plots, objects of the material world, loci and certain meanings that are assigned to characters and objects. The image of the steppe in the folklore of the Cossacks seems to be the most developed, it has received stable characteristics that have passed into fi ction on the “steppe” theme. In his novel “Gypsy” A.V. Kalinin reproduces the frontier character of the steppe, depicting it as a place of meeting and interaction between two ethnocultural groups – the Cossacks and the Gypsies. All the heroes and heroines of the novel – both the Gypsies and the Cossacks – are the people of the steppe. There are several historical, social, and cultural stereotypes regarding both of these groups. There are characters by Kalinin who conform to certain stereotypes (Sheloro and Yegor), and there are characters who violate them (Nastya). Boudulai occupies a special place in the novel’s character system. Diff ering from both the Gypsies and the Cossacks, this hero in many ways becomes a link between them and embodies the idea of “erasing” the boundaries between them, asserts the equality of all steppe people. The Gypsies and the Cossacks are both contrasted and compared in the novel, and there are many more similarities. This is also facilitated by the compositional technique of duality in the character system.