The Poetics of Mikhail Kuzmin’s Fairy Tales

Abstract

The article focuses on the poetics of Mikhail Kuzmin’s fairy tales collected in a unified cycle by the author (1912–1914). Literary scholars have only occasionally turned to certain aspects of these works in the context of studying other Silver Age writers’ tales. Nevertheless, the artistic  authenticity of Kuzmin’s fairy tales is an important problem, the solution of which allows one to come closer to understanding the peculiarities of the poetics of the writer's short prose.

Our study showed that the poetics of Kuzmin’s literary tales is characterized by features of folklore tales (compositional features, narrative formulas, fabulous chronotop), but the main genre model is still a short story, with its common features: brevity, pointe and an unexpected ending. Most of Kuzmin’s fairy tales (“Prince Desire”, “The Knight’s Rules”, “The Six Brides of King Gilbert”, “The Daughter of the Genoese Merchant”, “The Golden Dress”) manifest features typical of his stylized novels: a counterintuitive combination of elements from different cultures, transformation and a mixture of genres, rich intertext (including autointertext), a high degree of aesthetics and irony, light eroticism, lack of didacticism, playing with the reader. Kuzmin's fairy tales incorporate poetic features of other genres (anecdote, parables, etc.). All these features make possible plural interpretations of the works and allow us to consider their poetics close to such a variety of post-symbolism as pre-postmodernism. All Kuzmin's tales are dedicated to one area of moral and philosophic problems – the flexibility and inertia of a person’s thinking, love, the search for answers to questions about life and others.

The presence of these features of poetics in all Kuzmin's fairy tales and the type of problematics common to them testifies to their artistic unity, i. e. to the presence of a cycle.