COMPOSITE MARKERS OF MENAJNY CODE IN ANDREY PLATONOV'S STORY “THE THIRD SON”

Consideration of a literary work in a system of contexts has long become a common literary practice. The menajny code as one of the tools, which include the text in the field of transtextual connections, was proposed by the author several years ago and tested against many works of Russian literature, among which Chetyi-Minei became one of the conceptual texts. The article offers an analysis of the story by Andrei Platonov “The Third Son” from the point of view of the implementation in it of a menajny-structured system of characters – a family of three generations gathered for the mother’s funeral. The purpose of the article is to “decipher” the menajny code contained in the story and disclose, on the basis of the data obtained, one of the implicit aspects of the idea of the text. The uniqueness of the chosen work is that while the names of the characters occupy the key position in the menajny code, the story “The Third Son” has no names of the characters or other signs of the "reality" of the situation. Considering the maximum abstraction of narration, the composition of the story characterized by a multi-vertex system of images becomes the main marker of menajny codification. The six brothers, despite the difference in their destinies, are equal in their devotion to their family, in their spiritual strength. They are a continuation of the deceased mother, in whose image hagiographic motifs can be traced. The third son plays the central role in the novel due to the fact that the meaning of what is happening is concentrated in his image: he brings a small daughter to the parental home, becoming a symbol of the bond of generations, stops the inappropriate fun of the brothers; and his fainting, which can be seen as a posthumous miracle of the mother, makes the other sons experience grief and discover new life truths. The author comes to the conclusion that by attracting the readers as a full-fledged generators of meaning, Platonov frees them from predetermined negative evaluations, allowing them to understand the true biblical significance of the interaction of the brothers on their way to comprehending existential meanings.

menaion code, composition, context, hagiography, Gospel