THE CHRONOTOPE OF THE FAIRY TALE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF MOUNT QOF, THE STEPPE AND THE "FORTY-DAY JOURNEY", THE DARK FOREST AND THE CASTLE IN THE CLOUDS IN AI-GENERATED RETELLINGS

Every fairy tale takes place in a world with its own geography and its own time. Uzbek heroes leave the family o’tov or village, cross mountains and steppes, “walk a little, walk a lot” (oz yuribdi, ko’p yuribdi), travel for forty days and forty nights, and sometimes reach Mount Qof at the edge of the world. English heroes leave a poor cottage, enter a dark forest, reach the well at the world’s end or climb to a castle in the clouds, and return after “a year and a day”. In Bakhtin’s terms, these are chronotopes: fused images of space and time that shape the meaning of the story and reflect a culture’s view of the world. As large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini increasingly retell and invent fairy tales, it is important to ask whether they preserve these culturally specific worlds or move heroes into a different landscape.