The subject of the present dissertation, Pastemak's earliest work, is represented hereabove by six prose fragments of 1911-1913, five of which are printed here for the first time. The purpose of the book was to describe these fragments not only in their own right as relatively self-contained entities written in a markedly individual although still immature style, but also with respect to their potential as the embryo of the later works. These samples of Pastemak' s prose presented certain methodological difficulties due to the fact that strictly structuralistic methods of investigation and description were inadequate here, partly because of the imperfections of the first prose pieces (their fragmentariness, repetitiveness, redundancy), partly because a mere description of these texts in terms of inner structure would fail to indicate sufficiently the properties which would become relevant in a later period. In order to obtain the fullest possible description of these texts a combination of research methods was used: structural descriptions were combined with historical and textological ones. Thus both synchronic and diachronic dimensions of the texts were taken into consideration. In keeping with this methodological approach the investigation falls into three major divisions: chapter 1 establishes the links between the prose passages in question and the later work; chapter 2 deals with their structure and imagery, and chapter 3, which is based on textological data, is dedicated to the inner history of the texts.