ON ARTISTIC STRUCTURE OF "THE LAST OF JOAN OF ARC'S RELATIVES" ("POSLEDNII IZ SVOISTVENNIKOV IOANNY D'ARK")
The status of “The last of Joan of Arc's relative” (LR for brevity) has not been elucidated properly so far. During last decades, hypotheses were suggested according to which 1) LR is the artistic text, 2) a veiled biographic testimony - the story about Heeckerens' denial of duel. However, no convincing arguments were found in favor of 1). Relation with the duel story provokes no doubts but relations with the denial of Pushkin from “Gavriiliad“ are also indubitable. As a result, the meaning of the double biographic subtext remained unclear. In the present work, we show that the artistic nature of LR is embodied in its inner structure (system of motifs, hidden word play, iconic devices of embodiment of the idea, multiple relation between characters, prototypes and pretexts, motif connection between pretexts). The double biographic subtext fits in this structure naturally. LR turns out to be a synthetic text in which biographic elements became the part of its artistic structure.