Nicolai Barshev belongs to the group of Leningrad writers, who created their works in the third decade of the 20th century and are entirely unknown for readers nowadays. In the same time, profound and all-around studying of the second row writers' prose is necessary for better understanding the process of literal evolution of the first half of the 20th century. The motives connected with basic ontological and existential motifs turned out to be in the field of our studying. It was identified that the main concept for the writer's world model is a water element, which defines the mortal bubble of human existence as a basic cell of the Universe. The fundamental law, due to which the march of time is cyclized, is referred to as material exchange. It states that things don't appear everywhere from nothing and don't disappear. Barshev's character creates a conception of earth cycles, which can be applied to the world view of other characters; at first everything in life is small and foggy, than life substance becomes consolidated and turns into trifles, after that it turns into big substance, while the basis remains the same. The research reveals that water is predominant over other elements (air, fire, and earth), which can be endowed with liquid characteristics. The substantial origin of Barshev's world has impact on time. Due to the performed research different temporal types of Barshev's prose are identified, in which the historical and mythopoetical models proved to be interconnected. While the natural time keeps to be undisturbed by cataclysms in human world, the historical (social) time, after still another apocalypse coming, changes its march, can speed up or, on the contrary, slow down, becomes spoiled. The death of a man in mortal world is the main collision of Barshev's prose. The feeling of continuous death presence makes the writer's character strive to find the way of its overcoming, to get support in this permanently destroying universe. It determines the specific sensual palette of Barshev's hero, that includes envy, bafflement and madness.
The analysis reveals numerous mythologems that are involved in Barshev's prose (mythologems of flight, Noah's Flood, death-blindness), intertextual inclusions of classic and modern writers (A. Pushkin, N. Gogol, M. Lermontov, A. Chekhov, the poems of A. Blok and S. Yesenin), connection with different philosophical conceptions (including works of P. Uspensky, P. Florensky, N. Fedorov, V. Vernadsky ect.). Several types of Barshev's heroes can be singled out: – algae (that refers to people who can't accustom to new, post-revolutionary reality – Kronid Semenovich (The Fourth)); – cosmos victims, silent majority, who are not completely capable for self-reflection (Schukina (The Big Bubbles)); – mediators who are doomed for machinelike activity connected with the words without art (Piotr The Great (Anton's Trifles)); – creative persons who can overcome death (Shamshurenkov (Incombustible Fireworks)). Synthesis of different artistic system in Barshev's stories (including neorealism, avant-gard and postmodernism) gives an opportunity to correct the common conceptions of literal evolution of the first half of the XXth century in Russia.
