THE GENRE STRUCTURE OF S.G. CHAVAYN’S STORIES
IN THE CONTEXT OF FOLKLORISM’S PROBLEMS
OF THE MARI LITERATURE OF THE FIRST THIRD OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Raisia A. Kudryavtseva¹, Tatiana N. Belyeva²*, Marianna V. Ryabinina³, Elena G. Lastochkina⁴, Elena M. Andrianova⁵ and Vitaliy T. Mikhaylov⁶

¹ Prof., Mari State University, Russia, kudsebs@rambler.ru
² Asst. Prof., Mari State University, Russia, sokolova_beljaeva@mail.ru
³ Asst. Prof., Mari State University, Russia, mari.riabinina@yandex.ru
⁴ Senior Lecturer, Mari State University, Russia, antrolea@mail.ru
⁵ Asst. Prof., Mari State University, Russia, andrilea@rambler.ru
⁶ Asst. Prof., Mari State University, Russia, vitatim@yandex.ru
* Corresponding author 

Abstract
The urgent direction of modern Mari and Finno-Ugric literary criticism is the study of genesis and dynamics of poetics prose’s genres. Small genres of the Mari prose are the least studied in this plan.

This article covers the problem of formation of the Mari story’s poetics on the basis of imitation, loan and creative assimilation of oral and poetic experience of the people. The genre structure of Sergey Grigorievich Chavayn’s stories is analyzed in the context of folklorism of the Mari literature of the first third of the twentieth century. It reveals the connection between the literary and folklore poetics and defines the specific of folklorism in Chavayn’s stories.

It is proved that one of founders of the Mari literature, language and cultures Chavayn had strong influenced from folklore genres, traditional plots and images, and the folk language.

The Influence from folk elements is felt almost at all levels of his works: moral and imaginative, plot and composition, stylistic, etc.

At the same time the writer mastered the literary form of the life’s representation, created a literary poetics. This is evidenced by such phenomena of genre content and structure of the stories, as the changing of the ending of folk legend («Yulanda»), the second-guessing of the character of a folk personage (strengthening of the image's dominant), the deviation from the ordinary folk scheme and the creation of new characters of the personage (personages Yulanda and the Russian Tsar in the story («Yulanda»); the alteration of old folk songs and the composing their songs by analogy with them («The fugitive»); the single event storyline, which is accomplished and integral, with one or two (depending on the nature of the conflict) characters; synthetic genre forms of the story (an oral story develops from the story-essay and the story, which is similar to the novella); the development of the methods of a psychologization of the narration ("the internal gesture", landscape details in psychological functions); the lyricism; the author's digression in the form of appeal – direct (to heroes or readers) or rhetorical; the use of verbal images in the art purposes in all types of descriptions; the expansion of the art functions of the landscape; the circular composition («Okaviy»), etc.

Keywords: Mari literature of the first third of the XXth century, genre, story, poetics, S.G. Chavayn, genre structure, folklorism.