Snow White on the Border of Worlds: a Liminal Character in Venya Drkin's Fairy Tale

The paper analyzes the neo-mythopoetics of the Donbass storyteller of the late twentieth century, Alexander Litvinov (Veni Drkin), who works in the post-bard style. Using a comparative methodology, the preservation and translation of folklore plots and images in postmodern culture is investigated using the example of fairy tale "About Snow White". It is shown that several cultural spaces are integrated in the text: archaic fairy-tale, rocker, modern to the author profane household, thieves and otherworldly. In a fairy-tale space, the personage acts according to the scheme of female and male initiation at the same time. Snow White lives in the village of Maksyutovka, a double of the real Masyutovka of the Kupyansky district of the Kharkiv region, and is in a liminal state between a girl and a woman, unable to make an initiatory transition, since the entire male generation of her possible suitors died in the war, leaving Snow White the eternal bride and the queen of the dead. In the forest there the personage meets with magical assistants and fights with a Dragon. The otherworldly nature of the heroine is emphasized with the help of an autoreference allowing to attribute her to cosmogonic characters of different mythologies who create the world out of themselves. Profane household space is represented by details of urban life (locksmiths, TV), thieves' space is represented by jargon and a quote from the cult late Soviet film "The Meeting Place cannot be Changed", and rocker space is represented by the use of the word flat to describe the scene. Thus, in a short unfinished tale by a Donbass storyteller, several cultural spaces are connected based on a folklore plot in the image of the liminal character Snow White.