The contexts of Vladimir Erl’s non-children’s short story “Misha in zoological garden” (“Misha v zoosade”)

A representative of the Leningrad counter-culture of the 1960s, Vladimir Erl deconstructed clichés and stylistic devices characteristic to the official literature in his works. The goal of this research is to identify the contexts that were important to him when he was working on the short story “Misha in the zoological garden”. This short story belongs to a series of short stories created by him together with his co-author D. Makrinov in 1966–1967. The short stories are disguised as children’s literature but are not perceived as such. Comparison of these texts with short stories written by well-known Soviet writers leads to the conclusion that V. Erl and his co-author D. Makrinov, who perceived themselves as direct successors of the Russian avant-garde tradition of the early 20th century, used the literary devices of avant-garde writers such as D. Kharms and A. Kruchenykh to deconstruct stereotypical plots and rhetoric. Boris Zhitkov’s series of short stories “Zoological garden” (“Zoosad”, 1966) had been used as a pretext for the short story as was pointed out by V. Erl himself. The beginning of the plot is an assumed visit to a zoo but the short story contains no zoo. It contains plenty of “literary hooliganism” and intricate playing with contexts and pretexts instead. That is why a conventional logically developing plot is of no importance; the intrigue lies in enciphering of the text by the authors and in deciphering of the text by readers. The authors followed the pastiche tradition that allows one to parody different layers of a literary text, such as plots, style, characters’ and narrator’s speech patterns, but making them recognizable at the same time.