The article is devoted to comprehension of the artistic originality of the novel by Yuz Aleshkovsky - one of the most significant representatives of the Soviet underground movement, and later the «third wave» of Russian emigration. Using the principles of comparative-typological and holistic methods of analysis of literary works, the author concludes that, first, the genre of «Modest blue kerchief» can be defined as philosophical novel. The characters of ?Kerchief‘, as well as characters of other Russian classical philosophical novels, hold philosophical conversations, talk about life and death, about Soviet reality; their conversations integrate creative and theoretical ways of thinking, understanding of social and moral issues through the prism of the «eternal» questions, dialogic relationship of philosophical points of view of the protagonist and the author-narrator. Secondly, the space-time chronotope of a very specific microenvironment in the novel of Aleshkovsky is blended into the author's time, which is correlated with the locus of the protagonists. Third, in «Modest blue kerchief», the author links the fantastic and the epistolary traditions. Carnival, grotesqueness, absurdities, use of allusions, reminiscences and symbols become the fundamental devices used by Aleshkovsky to create images of «the material bodily bottom» opposing the «official» culture. Finally, the key themes of the novel are the theme of the great Patriotic war, duplicity, a man's place in a totalitarian state; the major motifs - the motif of madness and the substitution, as well as the motif of inner freedom
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