Shvarts’s Fairy Tale “The Princess and the Swineherd” in the Context of Intertextuality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31168/Keywords:
Intertextual markers, dramatic fairy tale, hypertext, hypotex, Sablina’s typology, Soviet literature of the 1930s, anti-fascist subtext, fairy tale tradition, literary adaptation, dialogue of culturesAbstract
Evgeny Shvarts's "The Princess and the Swineherd" (1934) weaves together the plots of three Hans Christian Andersen tales — "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Swineherd", and "The Princess and the Pea" — into a dramatic fairy tale that functions simultaneously as political allegory and philosophical parable. This study investigates the play's intertextual architecture by drawing on Genette's concept of hypertextuality, Kristeva's theory of textual transposition, Bakhtin's dialogism, Fateeva's model of intertextual counterpoint, and Lipovetsky's poetics of the "re-created plot." Sablina's linguistic typology of quotation, originally developed for media discourse, is adapted here as a classification tool for dramatic texts. Combining comparative, structural-functional, and cultural-historical methods, the analysis identifies forty discrete intertextual markers across four textual levels: plot-compositional, imagistic, ideological-thematic, and stylistic. These markers comprise direct quotations (3), allusions (7), reminiscences (5), paraphrases (4), cultural codes (12), recurring motifs (8), and pastiche (1). The cultural codes of the 1930s, which constitute the largest category (30%), encode anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian meanings beneath the fairy-tale surface, revealing how Shvarts employed the genre as a vehicle for ideological dissent under Soviet censorship. The findings demonstrate that Shvarts does not merely adapt Andersen's source material but systematically reconstitutes it: reconfiguring character functions, complicating narrative structure, and embedding a sociopolitical dimension absent from the hypotexts. A layered model of intertextual relations – spanning archetypal, pre-textual, textual, and cultural-contextual strata – is proposed, offering a replicable framework for future studies of the twentieth-century Russian literary fairy tale.
Received 3 March 2026
Revised 21 May 2026
Accepted 11 June 2026
For citation: Abdyramanova, A. Sh., Seitkojoeva, Z. A., Dronov, E. O., 2026. E. Shvarts’s Fairy Tale “The Princess and the Swineherd” in the Context of Intertextuality. Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 21 (1–2), pp. 167–185. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2026.21.1-2.10
