Literary text as a place of archiving the past in M. Shishkin’s short story collection “The Half-Belt Overcoat”

We analyze the principles of working with memory and elements of the past in the stories of M. Shishkin from the collection "Coat with a strap", which using intertextual, contextual, structuralist methods, the method of holistic analysis of a literary text, are considered. The notions of narrative, montage, memory, punctum, stadium are used for the analysis, the specificity of photography as a cultural fact is considered. It is proved that within the framework of small prose, the prose writer arranges a narrative, which in one way or another integrates the elements of the past and the motives of memory. Appealing to the things as facts of everyday life, the narrator constructs a specific scheme “thing – image – space” within the text. This creates a specific catalogue of things, archiving experiences and memories. This catalogue helps to go from loss of some facts of the past (photographs) through the act of memory to fixation of this past in the text, thus contributing to “resurrection” and salvation of the past through the Word. In addition, the role of the corpus of photographs in the collection is examined. It is revealed that the photographs not only serve as a reference point for the act of remembering and restoring the past, confirming what is described, but also include the reader in the fact of text unfolding. The materials of the study and its conclusions can be used not only for the analysis of other works by M. Shishkin, but also in the analysis of modern domestic and world literature in the context of memory studies.