I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

A. and B. Strugatsky, “Ugly Swans”, social fiction, genesis of consciousness, the image of a teenager, initiation, moral and ethical issues, artistic axiology

Science fiction writers begin shaping the image of the future by asking the question: “What is the human like?”. In the center of artistic research of the authors of the story “The Ugly Swans” (1967) are the most pressing problems of the present day: the content and meaning of the “human” in a person, the formation of a moral “frame ” of the personality in adolescence, the correlation of ethics and intellect in the value system of the younger generation, the role and status of the teacher during growing up. Тhe paper dwells upon the peculiarities of artistic representation of the image of a teenager in the axiological aspect: the conditions for the formation of young “prodigies” consciousness and the reasons for their collective divergence. The analysis of the work goes from the genesis of adolescent consciousness conditioned by the motives of the disintegration of home and family, the intensive maturation influenced by the intellectual authority of the “four-eyes”-ideologists (leper people suffering from disfiguring “yellow leprosy” manifesting itself as yellow circles around the eyes), to the interpretation of the meaning of the title of the story in the perspective of an intertextual dialogue with one of the most famous fairy tales by Hans.Chrisitian h. Andersen in the context of moral and ethical issues (the story was first published in 1986 under the title “The Beautiful Duckling”). The cultural-historical research method in combination with the method of philological analysis of the text made it possible to conclude that the existential side of the adolescents’ worldview is manifested as an extensive experience of nihilism based on the denial of the basic foundations of the socio-cultural being of adults, and spiritual asceticism and intellectual development without moral and ethical dominant leads to personal deformation – the decay of the soul and death of the Human.

Свитенко Наталья Вячеславовна – кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры истории русской литературы, теории литературы и критики Кубанского государственного университета, г. Краснодар, Россия, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9590-5483, svitenko@list.ru