The phenomenon of Russian classics in the works of L.E. Ulitskaya
Introduction. The researchers focus on identifying the attitude of modern writers to world and national classical literature and traditional (folklore) culture. The problem is posed and solved on the material of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel “Yakov’s Ladder”. This work is considered by the authors of the article as a kind of quintessence of L.E. Ulitskaya’s reflections on the place and significance of the classical heritage in the life of an individual and society as a whole. The interpretative models of works of Russian and world classics included in the text of Ulitskaya’s work for staging them on stage are also of fundamental importance in this context. Among them are texts of Slavic mythology and folklore, as well as masterpieces by A. Chekhov, N. Leskov, V. Shakespeare, D. Swift and P. Merime. In the process of analyzing the material, traditional methods (comparative-historical and typological) are used. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the texts of Russian and world classics, as well as traditional (folklore) culture, occupy a central place in the novel “Yakov’s Ladder”: they determine its genre specifics (including stories about theatrical productions in the narrative), plot (statements about individual authors and works in the diaries and letters of Yakov Osetsky are developed into full-fledged narratives of theatrical productions), the poetics itself (direct citation of the characters’ ratings and reviews about the authors and tests; casual dialogues about the art of close-minded heroes of the novel; correlation by the characters of the novels of their own behaviour with behaviour models of literary heroes of world and Russian classics). In general, this work is a kind of evidence of great interest, respect and at the same time the most curious experiments with the classical heritage in the work of L.E. Ulitskaya.