Poetics of the Story Dere ‒ Water Wedding (1932) in the Context of V. Mart’s Far Eastern Prose of the 1920–1930s

The article discusses the poetics of the story Dere ‒ Water Wedding by Venedikt Mart in the context of prose published in the period from 1924 to 1930 devoted to the Far East topics. The writer is often remembered as one of the brightest representatives of futurism in the Far East, however, his prose is still poorly understood. V. Mart’s work is closely connected with the literary process of the Asia-Pacific region, this work reflects the problem of the loss of national and cultural identity of the Far Eastern population, in particular the identity of “gol’dy”. The story has an educational orientation and, at the same time, has a peculiar artistic world. The article discusses the methods of creating fabulous coloring at the substantive and narrative levels. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of poetics and plot through which the author shows the loss of self-identification and the loss of the ancient traditions of a small Far Eastern people under the influence of the realities of the “new life”. We consider the story Dere ‒ Water Wedding as the last prose work by V. Mart on the Far Eastern theme in the context of his other works in order to trace the artistic transformations and changes in texts devoted to this subject. The study revealed that by the beginning of the 1930s, the writer had abandoned futuristic techniques using irony to create a comic effect and returning to the origins of literature ‒ a fairy tale story. A comprehensive study of V. Mart’s work on one topic allows us to identify another feature of his work ‒ the use of “nomadic” phrases, which are almost literally repeated in texts published in another years. Keywords: V. Mart, self-identification, rare book, the Far East, poetics