The Evolution of the Genre Poetics of the Story in the Works of Zinaida Katkova

This article traces the evolution of the genre poetics of short prose by Zinaida Fedorovna Katkova, a Mari bilingual writer of the second half of the 20th century. Based on six of her short stories written between 1958 and 1979 ("The Stranger," "The Return," "Little Samar," "Help Me Fall in Love with You," "The Unexpected Guest," and "For the Sake of Love"), the article establishes a genre typology characteristic of the writer and identifies the specific features of the development of the genre content and genre poetics of the short story. The author focuses on such levels and properties of poetics as psychologism, composition, chronotope, and artistic detail. The article also explores the features of genre synthesis and the ways of forming subtexts, identifying the main vectors of genre transformation in short stories, from socially conditioned psychologism to existential psychologism, and from simple compositions to complex narrative structures. The methodological basis of this study is a synthesis of structural-semantic, historical-genetic, and comparative-typological analysis of literary texts that corresponds to the purpose of the work. For the first time, the development of Zinaida Katkova's genre poetics in her short stories has been analyzed, and it has been proven that Zinaida Katkova's short prose is a unique example of the consistent and organic evolution of the genre system in the Russian-language works of a national author. Zinaida Katkova's stories from the 1950s and 1970s not only demonstrate the growth of individual mastery, but also reflect the general trends in the development of Russian prose in the second half of the 20th century: the dynamics of psychologism from social reflection to existential self-reflection, the transformation of the chronotope from a closed space to an open and psychologized one, the complexity of the poetic system, which can be clearly seen in the change in the nature of artistic details, the movement towards complex genre synthesis and genre hybridization, and the increasing role of subtext. Zinaida Katkova's unique type of psychological story, which synthesizes the traditions of Russian classical literature and the peculiarities of the national worldview, is of significant interest for further study and deserves a worthy place in the history of Russian literature.