TIMEKEEPING AND CHRONOLOGY OF ARKADY GAIDAR’S STORY “TIMUR AND HIS TEAM”

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of timekeeping in Arkady Gaidar’s story “Timur and His Team” (1939) and the problem of coherence of real and artistic time. On the material of the text of the story a register of indications on the time of action (fixation of time in the text: an indication of the exact time, mentioning sounds that measure time, description of the time of day, the position of celestial luminaries, etc.) is proposed. The connection between the temporal marking of the text and the dynamics of the events described in it is revealed. In turn, the analysis of the internal chronology of the story allowed us to identify a gap in its chronologically linear composition and to propose an explanation for this gap. Various documents of the late 1930s (government decrees and resolutions, railway timetables) were used to clarify the dating of the story’s events. The study of the history of the story’s first publication on the pages of the newspaper “Pionerskaya Pravda” made it possible to suggest the influence of Gaidar’s fragmentation of the text for the newspaper publication on the reader’s perception. The combination of timing, internal calendar chronology and peculiarities of the first newspaper publication of the story (in parts) caused the strengthening of the effect of the life-like nature of the story, which, apparently, was part of Gaidar’s creative intentions.

Keywords: Arkady Gaidar, “Timur and His Team”, time, timing, chronology, Lake Khasan