Chronotopic initialization of the narrative as a genre feature of the story

The subject of the study is the principle of chronotopic initialization of the story's beginning – a regularity according to which the beginning of a piece of short prose contains at least one marker of the category of time or space. The object of the research is the beginnings of texts of contemporary Russian short prose. The author examines in detail the typology of models of chronotopic initialization: chronotopic beginning, spatial beginning, atmospheric beginning (descriptive temporal ensemble), actional beginning, and reflexive beginning, as well as two special subtypes – diary and biographical. Special attention is given to the genre determination of the principle: the limited volume of the story requires the immediate introduction of chronotopic coordinates in the first lines of the text. The place of chronotopic initialization is defined in the system of other temporal mechanisms of short prose. The material consists of 59 texts from three authors: A. A. Matveeva, M. A. Kucherskaya, and O. A. Slavnikova. The principle is verified by the method of categorical-textual analysis by T. V. Matveeva based on a complete sample of beginnings from 59 texts of short prose in paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and compositional aspects. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that the principle of chronotopic initialization of the story's beginning has been identified, verified, and typologized for the first time. A typology of models of chronotopic initialization has been proposed for the first time, including five main types and two special subtypes. The concepts of descriptive chronotopic ensemble, chronological framework, and temporal accumulation have been introduced for the first time. The main findings of the conducted research are as follows: it is shown that in 54 out of 59 texts (91.5%), the beginning contains at least one chronotopic marker, and cases of lack of initialization represent a genre-determined technique. The model of the beginning is defined not by the author's idiosyncrasy but by the genre variety of the text. It is concluded that chronotopic initialization is a typological constant of the short story genre, rather than an individual authorial strategy.