The article studies the problems of forming intentional deformations of a narrative category of event in the prose of a famous Russian absurdist of the 1920s‑30s, a member of the avant‑garde collective Oberiu – Daniil Kharms. The study defines the main regularities of generating “normal” textual events as well as the mechanisms for their deformations and destructions within a narrative “story” and its “discourse”. The most important reasons for the “ludic” absurdity of events within D. Kharms’ short stories are the unintelligibility of the described objects, the ontological absurdity of the objects of events, the absurdity of the heroes’ behaviour and thinking, the sequence (multiplication) of events, the violation of structural order and the integrity of the described objects and their constituents, among others. The absurdization of events in the narrative “discourse” is presupposed by a set of semantic and pragmatic devices, in particular: the author’s assumed inability to create an event’s manoeuvring or to build the plot; the violation of the logic of the development of the plotline; making the modus and modality elements of the story weird; shifting points of view and their focuses, to name a few. The author’s intentional deviations within the “story” and the “discourse” of the belles‑lettres narrative cause communicative senses characteristic for an absurd type of writing: the senses of mental “charming”, which border on the reader’s cognitive “stupor”, as well as numerous senses of an evaluative and ludic character generated by the common “background” of the reader’s consciousness and borrowed, so to say, from “standard” belles‑lettres text types and narratives. The article outlines the perspectives of lingual‑narrative studies into weird (absurd, in particular) belles‑lettres texts.

It is proved that one of V. Nabokov’s most famous novels Invitation to a Beheading is a fictional narrative with a complicated interaction of various types of story‑telling instances. There are persons of a non‑diegetic narrator, who incorporates the features of an all‑knowing and a limited teller, explicated with a different degree of definiteness; a diegetic narrator – the main hero, – who is thinking his state over, is talking to himself, is writing a letter to his wife; a non‑personalized narrator, similar to the abstract narrator in a set of traits; and a hardly definable narrator, who is telling the text story addressing the main hero in the second person and who can be identified as a non‑diegetic or a diegetic narrator talking to himself. The article defines the correlation of these indefinitely outlined story‑telling instances (convergence, binding, juxtaposition), ones identified with difficulty. Conducted is a lingual differentiation of the mentioned story‑tellers’ expression, mainly, via deictic elements (mostly, pronouns); addresses; the “historical past” and “historical present” tenses; predicates that mark the participants’ diegesis or non‑diegesis as well as various intonational and stylistic means (the expression of evaluation, diminutive or augmentative noun forms and others). It is considered perspective to attempt to classify the lingual means of expressing the types of story‑telling instances in different belles‑lettres genres, to analyze the semantic and pragmatic reasons for forming the “story” and the “discourse” of a narrative. In general, the problem of the linguistic “dimension” of narratives is a perspective direction of investigation where there can be revealed semantic and pragmatic categories of production and perception of any type of narration, firstly, belles‑lettres – fictional by dint of its deep nature.