The Menacing Echo of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (B. Lavrenev’s “Wormwood-grass”)

The article deals with one of the brightest manifestations of the reception of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in the prose of the 20th century. B. Lavrenev’s story “Wormwood-grass”, which appeared a hundred years ago, contains many references to the Old Russian monument, which has become a precedent text of the national culture. The story can be called a characteristic example of ornamental prose of the mid 1920s. The mythopoetics of the medieval work acts as the main means of creating an epic-romantic sound of the New Age text telling about the events of the Civil war in the south of Russia. The references to a source easily recognisable to the reader are so extensive and consistent that the narrative sometimes turns into a kind of collage of various quotations and paraphrased fragments of the pre-text. The story is unrivalled in its saturation of references to the “The Tale” in prose.