Elements of expressionism in the story of A. Green «Gray Car»

The topic of the work is relevant, since at present the Russian literary criticism is rediscovering the features of the artistic expression of Soviet literature of the 1920s. The aim of the study was to discover the features of the poetics of Green’s text that allow us to identify the novel under consideration as expressionist. Research methods used in the article: comparative-historical and semantic analysis of texts. At the beginning of the article, the research of the novella «Gray Car» by A.V. Polupanova and L.U. Zvonareva is considered, inaccuracies and obvious factual errors are noted, indicating a lack of understanding of the text, a mixture of such forms of expression of the author’s position (according to B.O. Korman) as «hero-narrator» and «author-narrator». As an empirical material, in addition to the novel by A. Green, the works of G. Mayrink, F. Kafka and L. Perutz were used. As a result of consideration of the novels «the Golem», «Castle», «the Cossack and the Nightingale», «the Wizard of judgment» was allocated with the following features art in the world of the expressionist literary works: a) the problem of identity associated, as a rule, the main character; 2) semema madness, which became a constant for expressionist texts; 3) mysterious (hidden) order of a seemingly chaotic world; 4) the lack of success of speech acts. All these features were found in the story of A. Green, so it seems that the new approach to the work of the writer as a representative of Russian expressionism, demonstrates its consistency and can be contrasted with the more traditional consideration of the author’s prose as a super-textual unity.