The article analyzes the transformation of the metasubject of the collection of Arabic fairy tales "One Thousand and One Nights" in the fairy-tale novel of English novelist F. Anstey "The Brass Bottle" and the fairy-tale story of Soviet writer L. Lagin "The Old Man Khottabych". An Anstey fantasy novel uses the old story of a genie emerging from a magic pot as a satirical device to poke fun at the British establishment. The author analyses Anstey's work and notes the peculiarities of the poetics of the story: the comicism of the mental antagonism between the Englishman Ventimore and the genie Fakrash el-Aamash which manifests itself on the linguistic and vocalistic level the trvestian and burlesque techniques the parody of the precedent text, the game with oblivion/time reference references the modelling of absurd and grotesque situations. The article proves that L. Lagin in his fairy-tale story "The Old Man Khottabych" creates a sociopolitical remake of the fantastic metasubject of Arabic fairytales - Anstey. The book "The Old Man Khottabych" is built on borrowing Anstey's main fantasy move - the blending of the fantastical and real worlds placing the demonic character of ancient fairy tales in the context of modernity. The writer uses various markers of intertextuality: explicit allusions, reminiscences. In Lagin's tale the humorous coverage of the characters remains, the satirical element is directed at the world of capital, the text is characterised by a dense ideological saturation and the aim to create an ideal picture of Soviet reality. There is a consistent demythologisation of the character, a secularisation of the transcendental element, a functional transformation of the fairy-tale primers, and a complete recoding of the text in terms of a set of Soviet ideologemes and political attitudes. More and more new artistic embodiments of the plastic plot of Arabic fairy tales in the spirit of Anstey (works by R. Leeson, N.L. Lagina) appear in literature. In Sergei Klado's (pseudonym: S. Oblomov) fairy-true story "The Old Man Khottabych's Copper Jug" (2006), this flexible plots become a commonplace intrigue in popular contemporary literature.
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