Russian Myth about Sorcerer and Enchanted Beauty: Structure, Genesis,
Evolution

This article considers a history of one of the most popular storylines of Russian literature “Sorcerer-Traitor and Enchanted Beauty”. The genesis of the fable usually associated with love line in Pushkin’s poem “Poltava” and Gogol’s story “A Terrible Vengeance”. In the Silver Age Russian literature this fable gained significance of a national myth. And the fate of the heroine for whom soul fighting the forces of good and evil becomes a personification of Russia’s historic path and Russia's development prospects. In the article is analyzed a mythological basis of the fable, identified motifs which have determined the evolution of the fable, and the main lines of its evolution. The analysis is based on a wide range of literary materials from the works of Russian classics of XIX–XX centuries to Nabokov’s “Lolita”, Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” and contem-porary novels of B. Akunin and D. Bykov.