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Abstract:

The question in the title of the article actualizes the meanings of A.P. Gaidar’s story, which are generated by the totality of all its spatio-temporal and plot-compositional levels, the subjective organization of the narrative, its intonation and stylistic richness. The correctness of M.O. Chudakova’s term “poetics of fictitious problems”, used in relation to Gaidar’s work, is cast into doubt by the author of the article, since none of the semantic sections of the narrative here can be qualified as “fictitious”. The article shows that the hero-narrator, without breaking the intonation integrity, without betraying his companion-interlocutor and the listener-addressee, a six-year-old child, takes the narrative out of the personal dacha and family chronotope into a large historical time and space. The plot of the story unfolds as a movement from private family concerns to social ones, from the dacha routine — into the pre-storm atmosphere of an approaching war, from a situation of family problems — to the premonition of an impending great disaster, the symbol of which is the broken blue cup. The article compares Gaidar’s story with the film by N.S. Mikhalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun” and it is shown that the dotted lines of signs of deep social ill-being brought to the surface of Gaidar’s narrative are exposed by their projection (direct and hidden references) in Mikhalkov’s film. It can be assumed that the “Blue Cup” was one of the sources of the script, chronotope and intonation for “Burnt by the Sun”. At the same time, the film serves as a kind of “developer” of what, in accordance with the laws of the genre and due to circumstances, Gaidar did not say, but implied.