Intertextuality as a Postmodern Narrative Strategy in the Novelette “The Burning War of the Mind” by Tolen Abdikov

The article researches the novelette “Parasat Maydany” by the Kazakh writer T. Abdikov in its Russian version—“The burning war of the mind”—one of the best examples of the national literature of Kazakhstan of the first decade of this century. The aim of the study is to determine the role of intertextuality in the discourse of the writing as a narrative strategy for translation of the authorial intention and reflection to the reader through a combination of “own” and “foreign” words in the text. The main research method is narratology, particularly its contemporary theoretical developments in the field of communication strategies of the narrator with the narratee directly in the text, and the author with the reader—by means of the text. Individual approaches of receptive aesthetics and cognitive literary studies were also used for understanding the internal motives of the protagonist of the novelette, finding some mechanisms to influence the reader and to predict the reader’s reception on intertextual inclusions in the writing. The study revealed features of the narrative structure of the novelette, representing the strategy of intertextual games with the reader as a way for the author to interact with the reader by encoding intertext semantics of the writing and its desired decoding by the reader.