The Silver Age Literary Fairytale: Evolution of the Genre
This article discusses the genre of literary fairytale and its evolution in the late nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century. Its aim is to identify the genre’s specifics in the Silver Age, including its plot situation and type of language. The most interesting result of the work is the identification of the evolution of the genre, which appears in each of its three literary sub-types. In addition, it was found that the vast majority of the fairytales gravitate to cyclization, the origins of which relate to the specifics of the addressee (adult readers), something that dates back to the tradition of Saltykov-Shchedrin. The author of the article argues that we must understand the genre as a complete work, a whole utterance. This is clearly manifested in literary fairytales, whose dialogical nature is genetically determined. Clarifying the nature of the genre helps us to identify the literary fairytale’s pattern of growing and shrinking popularity in the Silver Age as one of the fundamental signs of the cultural dominant of the era, to understand the reasons for the genres re-actualization (a logical coming to its original essence), to comprehend the trends to accelerate and slow down the processes of genre formation in the literature of this time.