The analysis of the North Caucasian prose from the point of view of the specificity of the use of archaic imagery is thought to be a promising line of modern literary criticism. This article is supposed to consider the symbolic forms of reproduction of the ethnic picture of the world through mythological consciousness, fixed ideas of a person about the structure of the habitual living space, mechanisms of self-identification of the ethnic group. Symbols, mythologem and archetypes as direct translators of such information become the subject of this study, the object of literary analysis is the material of regional literature. As illustrative material the paper presents characteristic examples of epic poems, which found different forms of adaptation of the myth, sustainable symbols, canonical stories and folk stylization, i.e. the whole Arsenal of expressive means, which implies the introduction in a literary text, conditional-metaphorical content. In analyzing these issues, we were guided by the following criteria: the desire to consider in a comparative way the artistic samples that demonstrate the specificity of the ethnic worldview; to explore the texts of epic works in terms of the coincidence of interpretations of iconic images and values. The material of the study is quite extensive and heterogeneous, which is why we found it necessary to focus on the key points of interethnic relationships in order to identify typological features and nationally determined differences in the interpretation of archetypal imagery.