Motif of an unrecognized Emperor in its textual and plot modifications (on the materials of the historical anecdotes of the 18<sup>th</sup>, and the first half of the 19<sup>th</sup> century)
The subject of this study is a traditional motive of unrecognized or not at once recognized Emperor that had been used as a basis for the historical anecdotes about Russian Czars beginning from Peter The Great and ending with Nikolay I. Being applied to different historic persons the motive inevitably has an effect on the way its plot is embodied. Each embodiment may be considered as a particular case of the changes in public and literary self-consciousness. The transformation the motive undergoes in the course of its long usage is a good reason to raise a question about a proportion of constants and variables in its structure and semantics. There is certain dependence between the name of the Czar, the purpose why he prefers to stay unrecognized and the nature of the primary identification, so this paper is intended to determine this dependence.