Walpurgis night, or the steps of the commander by Venedikt Erofeev: paratext text

The article examines the structural elements of the paratext of Venedikt Erofeev’s play Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander (including the title, the author’s name and partly the dedication preface), as well as their interrelation with the text of the play. The double intertextual title of the tragedy is a sign of its intertextual game nature. The comparison of the key donor texts - Goethe’s Faust (including its Walpurgis Night scene) and Alexander Blok’s poem “The Steps of the Commander” - with the recipient text testifies to Erofeev’s selective approach not only towards these two texts, but also towards other probable pre-texts, in which the studied archetypal plots are actualized. Their transformation in the tragedy is carried out in a travesty mode. The analysis of the intertextems enables to test the initial hypotheses about the semantics and functions of the title. This task is facilitated by the dedication preface, which presents the name of the addressee of the tragedy, its “ideal” reader and critic, in encrypted form. Deciphering the name and clarifying the addressee’s identity gives an idea of the nature of communication and confirms the author’s orientation towards the game intertextual model. It is significant that the connection between the mentioned paratext elements and the text itself is also manifested in the fact that the title, the author’s name and the addressee’s name are included in the text in one form or another.