A love story in V. Pelevin’s “Nika” (mystification techniques)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the figurative-motivic and structural-compositional series of V. Pelevin’s short story “Nika” (1992), which is well-known among readers and researchers. The research aims to identify the main artistic mechanisms for creating a mystification, which the writer undertook in the text, ensuring the illusion of a “love story” that unfolded between the narrator and Nika. The author of the work focuses mainly on the image of the title character and emphasizes those structural and semantic moments that the novelist imitated in the mystifying space of the text. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time it examines not only the linguistic features of the mystification undertaken by the prose writer (wordplay, the use of ambiguity, polysemy, semantic shades of paronyms, modality, pun, etc.), but also the structural-compositional, plot-motivic, speech-stylistic, situational, behavioral-psychological, portrait, etc. aspects that Pelevin reproduced playfully in order to present the cat heroine in a different receptive and conceptual plane without distorting her real story. As a result, it is proved that the writer’s goals were not limited to a postmodern game, as previously believed by critics, but demonstrated the broad possibilities of realistic prose.