Carnival in the novel “Clown Yak” by Y. Bergman

The article analyses the novel “Clown Yak” by the Swedish writer Yalmar Bergman with regard to the carnival role in it. The relevance of the study is due to the absence of works devoted to this novel in Russian literary criticism. The theoretical level of the study is mainly based on the book “Francois Rabelais Rabelais's creativity and folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance” by M.M. Bakhtin. The carnival is revealed in the images of the main character and minor characters, in the image of the clown house. It turns out that the novel “Clown Yak”, written in the first half of the 20th century, has not only inherited the traditions of folk laughter culture, but also sheds light on the more complex problem of the artificiality of life and its equivalence to carnival.