Аннотация
In contemporary humanities, there is growing interest in understanding artistic space as a cultural and symbolic code capable of representing not only topographical but also axiological categories. Within this context, the image of the steppe – a geographical environment bearing archetypal, national, and ethical meanings – occupies a special place. This article analyzes the image of the steppe in K.Paustovsky’s prose as an artistic representation of Kazakhstan. The aim is to identify the poetic, semantic, and cultural functions of the steppe image in Paustovsky’s short stories “Trial by Desert”, “Night in Dossor”, and “Argument in the Railway Carriage”. The study focuses on the evolution of the image of the steppe from a space of existential trial to a space of human participation and intercultural dialogue, revealing the dynamics of its artistic and cultural functions of the steppe space in Paustovsky’s works devoted to Kazakhstan. The study is based on an interdisciplinary methodology that includes poetic-structural, motif, chronotopic, and symbolic-semiotic analysis. The results show that in Paustovsky’s work the steppe functions as an independent participant in the narrative – an animated space endowed with the functions of ethical insight and cultural memory. This allows us to speak of the steppe not as a background element, but as a cultural and conceptual categorycapable of structuring the narrative and representing national identity in twentieth-century literature. The value of the present study lies in its disclosure of an artistic model of the steppe as a cultural concept expressing the author’s humanistic views. The findings have practical significance for courses in literary studies, for intercultural communication in teaching Russian and Kazakh literature, and for the study of the poetics of space and time and the chronotope of identity.