“The Saboteurs” by A. Seghers: themes and poetics

The research aims to identify the distinctness of the themes and poetics of A. Seghers’s short story “The Saboteurs”. The scientific originality of our work lies in the fact that the artistic world of this short story is studied for the first time through the lens of themes and poetics. This made it possible to consider in more detail the multifaceted creative heritage of the writer, which continues to inspire researchers and readers. The results showed that the author, applying a realistic method, managed to embody the essential features of a country experiencing a difficult period of fascism and democratic reforms in a single human fate. The chronotope in A. Seghers’s short story “The Saboteurs” is a complex and multi-layered structure that helps to reveal the characters’ nature and reflects social, philosophical, and novelistic themes. The work has clearly visible plot lines, psychological individualization of characters, and an epic quality in the depiction of the social background. The central motif in the story is the motif of resistance, which is closely related to the motifs of friendship, mutual assistance, betrayal, loneliness, silence, fear, alienation, as well as face and mask, pretense, and death.