"Wise Fool": The Transformation of a Love Story in T. Tolstoy's Tale "Sonya"

Subject of the study: the representation of a love story in the early works of Tatyana Tolstaya, exemplified by the short story "Sonya" (1984). The focus is on the paradoxical situation in which the heroine's love directed towards an imaginary character (the phantom Nikolai) is not discredited as an illusion, but instead takes on the qualities of a genuine tragic act. The mechanisms of postmodernist poetics ("reversals," games with names, de-hierarchization) that Tolstaya uses are analyzed not to assert a total unreality of the world, but to illuminate the ethical nature of "stupidity." The system of character oppositions (Sonya-the fool vs. Ada-the serpent) is examined, as well as the role of the narrative strategy of memory, which legitimizes fiction as a fact of the past. Special attention is given to the transformation of the heroine's image at the end: the shift of action to besieged Leningrad transforms the ironic register into a tragic one, and the "crystal of stupidity" becomes synonymous with sacrifice. The methodological foundation of the article consists of historical-literary and structural-semiotic approaches, allowing for a comparison of Tolstaya's love story with both the classical Russian tradition (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev) and the poetics of postmodernism. The work also employs elements of intertextual analysis, narratology, and motif analysis. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the love conflict in "Sonya" is examined for the first time not as a simulacrum or linguistic game but as a "borderline" phenomenon, where postmodernist techniques serve to reveal realistic, existential values. Unlike previous works (by N. P. Benevolenskaya, E. A. Averyanova) that emphasized the cruelty of the trick or intertextual parallels, this article argues that the illusion of love in Tolstaya produces the heroine's genuine happiness and a real heroic deed. It has been established that the name semantics (Sonya - Sophia, "wise") is actualized not on an intellectual level but on a spiritual one: foolishness becomes a form of moral intuition, and the "enamel dove" (materialized soul) symbolizes an unwavering purity beyond death. It has been demonstrated that early Tolstaya oscillates between postmodernist de-hierarchization and the classical pathos of compassion, creating a unique syncretic style. The findings of the study can be used in university courses on contemporary Russian literature, in the study of postmodernist poetics, and in the evolution of female images in prose from the second half of the 20th century.