Studying precedent names in literature lessons (based on the names of the title characters in M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”)

This article presents the relevance of working with precedent linguistic phenomena in modern school philological education. The article comes to the conclusion about the role of literature as one of the main sources of precedent phenomena. Accordingly, this study analyzes the methodology of working with precedent names in literature lessons and demonstrates it using the title characters of M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”, a fictional text of high cultural and historical significance. We propose a step-bystep system, arranging the study of the analyzed lexical units in a literature class. Being based on the developed system, this study demonstrates a system of tasks, aimed to analyze the way the characters’ relationships are described, which is a key to understanding the text, and to further conscious use of the precedent name in everyday speech. The proposed methodological materials were used in teaching practice in the State Budgetary Educational Institution “School No. 1540” among 11th grade students as part of the implementation of additional profile education. The result of the conducted work is a detailed analysis of the answers provided by students. This system of tasks can be used in literature lessons of the 11th grade, while analyzing the title characters of Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. The article concludes that the implemented methodology and the developed system of tasks are effective: in the course of this work, students expanded their associative memory, supplementing it with the precedent name “The Master and Margarita”, uniformly used in modern discourse according to the conducted experiment.