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Abstract:

This article attempts to examine the most important period for the development of Latin American culture and literature, the Conquest, through the prism of Alejo Carpentier’s cultural theory of “the marvelous real”. The research material is the story of the Cuban author “El camino de Santiago”, which has not previously attracted much attention from Russian literary scholars. At the beginning of the article, the peculiarities of Carpentier’s artistic method, which consisted primarily in the thorough theoretical thoughtfulness of his works, are discussed, as well as the contradictory image of the conquistador in the aspect of his role in the emergence and development of Latin American civilization, and the perception of this image in the Latin American cultural space in different eras. The main part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the protagonist of the story “El camino de Santiago”, through which the author shows the mechanism of the formation of American ethnocultural consciousness and its modifications under the influence of the realities of the New World.