Intertextual сohesion as a tool for interpreting the author’s idea (“Fatima” by K.L. Khetagurov)

An important, if not the main, link in the intertextual relations of the poem “Fatima” by Kosta Khetagurov (1859–1906), the founder of Ossetian literature, which has fallen out of the field of view of researchers, is identified, namely, the interaction with “Poltava” by A.S. Pushkin. The goal is to determine the features of the author’s poetic dialogue with the aesthetics of the specified work. The rich range of lexical and ideological and semantic similarities with the precedent texts of Russian classics, previously outlined by the Khetagur scholars, is expanded in the article in terms of revealing the functional and semantic potential of references to “Poltava”. The study of intertextual convergence is carried out at the level of elements of autographic paratext (dedication, epilogue), the key idea of the work, the microtext of a separate image of the hero (Mazepa — Dzhambulat, Maria — Fatima, Kochubey — Naib). Particular attention is paid to the structural and stylistic commonality: a combination of romanticism and realism, plot-compositional reminiscences, a complex of motives for forbidden love, “rebellion” against the foundations of fathers, madness, oblivion, etc. It is shown that deep analogies with Pushkin’s poem are induced by the idea of doomed resistance to the course of History. At the same time, K. Khetagurov’s concept of Progress, in line with the artistic reception of Poltava, has been amended that are not related to the narrative, which are considered in the article from the standpoint of an ontological imbalance in displaying the theme of “man and his choice” (the tragedy of the personal destinies of the heroes who find themselves at the epicenter of the confrontation between the old and the new). It is concluded that the semantically significant inclusions from “Poltava”, together with the intertextual background already established in Ossetian philology, indicate the polygenetic nature of the artistic world of the poem “Fatima”, which should be considered within the framework of the transmission of the literary tradition and, in general, as a result of Kosta Khetagurov’s deep integration into Russian culture.