intertext

Zoshchenko’s “The Goat” and Gogol’s “The Overcoat” have a strong intertextual connection. The quoted image of the “little man”, the plot, motif reminiscences, similar narrative peculiarities disclose the writers’ literary succession. In this article we will analyze the intertextuality of the writers’ prose on the example of “The Overcoat” and “The Goat”, and consider Zoshchenko’s transformation of Gogol’s plots, motifs; we will fi gure out what meaningful functions the intertexts are performing. The main results are summarized as follows.

The article deals with the study of the intertext as a means of creating the information tension in a dicteme. It is justly pointed that the intertext is capable of delivering significantly more information than its verbal segment immediately contains. This ability is based on the mechanism of extracting the necessary associations from precedent texts, represented in a dicteme in the form of quotations and allusions.