Venedikt Yerofeyev's Play with National Identity Symbolism in the Poem "Moscow-Petushki"

The paper studies the peculiarities of literary processing by Ven. Erofeev's symbolism of national identity in the poem “Moscow - Petushki”. Based on the receptive aesthetics in the refraction of W. Iser and H. Jauss, the historical and cultural context of the poem is analyzed. Iser and H. Jauss, the historical and cultural context of the late socialist era, the background of the poem's author and the horizon of expectations of his contemporaries were analyzed. The analysis revealed two main features in Erofeev's treatment of national symbolism. First, each symbol possesses a two-level semantic hierarchy, where a preferred metaphysical meaning is revealed beneath the external ideological meaning. Second, there is a certain distance between the hero of the poem and the official ideological discourse, which allows us to speak of the “position of non-attachment” (poziciya vnenahodimosti) occupied by Venichka.