«Home» and «world» in the consciousness of the hero of I. Kapaev’s story «Salam, Mikhail An-dreevich!»

The article analyses the experience of artistic comprehension of the relationship between “Home” and “World” in the consciousness of another one incarnation of the cross-cutting hero (Karamov) through several works of I. Kapaev. It is noted that the theme of choice of the way of interaction with the World by a hero with a “shocked consciousness”, represents leitmotiv in I. Kapaev’s prose, and the fate of each of his Karamovs appears as a variant of its realization. The hero of the analyzed story, Mukhtar Karamov, an agricultural machinery operator, en-counters the World” at his departure from “Home”, first in his life - during a trip to the Yalta re-sort. The boundless sea, crowded embankments represent here a metaphor for this World. This World is also personified in the image of Ivan Kharitonovich Kalyagin, a Donetsk miner, Kara-mov’s roommate. The hero, at first overwhelmed by the splendor and diversity of the not very clear reality that opened before him, admiring Ivan Kharitonovich’s personal qualities, chooses a conflict-free way of interacting with this world: he copies the behavior patterns of its inhabitants, calls himself Mikhail Andreyevich, a more organic name for him, and tries to mechanically trans-fer its patterns into his home life. However, the conflict takes root in Karamov’s consciousness. The writer focuses on the reasons for the inner dissatisfaction of the hero, who once found himself between Home and the World, and sees this dissatisfaction in a more developed individuality than that of his fellow countrymen. Mukhtar Karamov feels a genuine interest in the big world, but also the need to dialog with it, equally preserving his own values. The hero’s long playing of the whis-tle in the courtyard of his house in the open finale of the story symbolizes the uneasy nature of his reflection. As material for analysis, the article uses the source language text of the analyzed story. The text translated into Russian is used for quoting.