Artistic embodiment of national cultural codes in the Belarusian epic

An artistic picture of the world in a literary work contains a system of artistic images, motifs, reflecting various aspects of cultural universals and having cultural meanings marked with the help of cultural codes. Codes of different cultures can be combined in works of art, but national cultural codes are aimed at showing the specifics of mental attitudes, features of the worldview, and behavior patterns of representatives of a certain culture. Investigating the specifics of the national picture of the world, researchers turn to the peculiarities of the representation of cultural meanings within the framework of dyads: “good – bad”, “life – death”, “male – female”, “real – ideal”, “West – East”, “own – someone else’s”, “harmony – disharmony” and others. The article examines changes and constants in the definition of cultural meanings highlighted with the help of the dyads “possible – impossible”, “now – then” using the example of Belarusian epic works of the first decades of the 20 th century and the turn of the 20 th and 20 th centuries. It is concluded that national cultural codes act as carriers of deep historical and cultural meanings, through which the social, economic, geopolitical, cultural features of representatives of a certain nation or even the population of the state as a whole are manifested.