Abstract
<jats:p>The article analyzes the motif of fate and the related strategy of documentary-fiction investigation chosen by Anna Matveeva to describe the tragedy in the mountains of the Northern Urals, which claimed the lives of nine young people in February 1959. The intertwining of the fictional plot and the unsolved mystery of the Dyatlov group’s demise creates a unique effect: through the sparse documents of the investigation and the personal diaries of the participants, the milestones of the characters’ destinies emerge. The receptive consciousness of the thirty-year-old heroine Anna plays a pivotal role in the novel. Compassionate and deeply empathetic, she strives to comprehend not merely the physical cause of death, but the metaphysical question of why fate singled out these nine individuals. Hence the inevitable intrusion of mystical motifs into the narrative fabric. The hybrid documentary-fiction text reveals its evocative nature at the level of composition and framing elements: it becomes an ascent to death, a pass of grief, shaping a polyphonic perception of the tragic material and reflecting the author’s worldview. The novelty of the work lies in examining not linguistic, but compositional evocation within the artistic text.</jats:p>