AbstractThe objective of the study is to educe the particular features of T. Tolstaya's small prose. Her texts are characterized by a high density of literary meanings and great complexity of literary structure. The article explores the correlations between these two phenomena by analyzing the short story “Yorick” and its translation into English. We uncover the literary meanings of the text, which are formed by means of a number of global cultural contexts (biographical, historical, literary, and mythopoetical). We also study the form that they take in Tolstaya's literary discourse and provide a comparative analysis of the discoursive literary techniques used by the author and their rendering by the translator. Both the analysis technique and the materials presented in the article can be used in teaching literary translation to students of Russian or English.