“Taiga Surprises” in Children's Prose by Mikhail Demenok

The work of the naturalist Mikhail Stepanovich Demenok (1937–2016) made a significant contribution to the development of natural science literature about the Primorsky Territory. The life and professional activities of this writer were always linked with the Ussuri Taiga: he worked as a forest engineer, chief forester, director of a forestry enterprise in Anuchinsky region of Primorye. Taiga became the main theme of his stories for children. The book of stories “Bird's Secret” (Vladivostok, 1987) introduces schoolchildren to the flora and fauna of taiga, describes the habits of wild animals and birds, their exterior and habitat. The author introduces rich cognitive material into the stories through elements of dialogue, question-and-answer structures of monologue speech, rhetorical questions, parenthetical words, parceled and inserted syntactic constructions, incomplete sentences and sentences with interjections and inversion of verbs. The author uses the visual capabilities of epithet, simile and metaphor to visualize taiga realia. Thematic and stylistic variety of vocabulary also plays an important role in the creation of an expressive image of nature. The natural science material is presented in a form of a riddle or a paradox, helping the reader to establish patterns and relationships in the natural world, to discover new facets of the world around us. The article is devoted to the study of syntactic and lexical features of speech that make up a unique “sense of discovery” in the works of Mikhail Demenоk.