Pushkin's Pages of Boris Vasiliev's Historical and Autobiographical Novels (Based on the Novel «The Player and the Brether, the Player and the Duellist»)

The subject of the article is the image of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin as a source of unique information within the boundaries of the writer's biography, allowing to conduct historically reliable literary research and to put forward a new assumption about the prototype of the hero of the work. The novel «The Player and the Brether, the Player and the Duellist», which opens the Oleksin cycle of B.L. Vasiliev's works, was taken as a material for analysis. A characteristic feature of the «Oleksin saga» is a complex, branched system of characters. Thanks to the study of «Pushkin's» plot line of the novel it was possible to put forward an assumption about the prototype of the hero of the work and to prove it, relying on archival materials of correspondence of A.S. Pushkin and his contemporaries. The problem of the prototype of the hero of the novel was addressed by V.A. Karnyushin, whose creative interest in this issue is due to the original ending of the novel. The aim of the study is to determine the prototype of the novel's hero.