Humanities & Social Sciences 5 (2016 9) 1074-1080 ~ ~ ~ УДК 82-3 The Archetype of a Cultural Hero in the Works of A. De Saint-Exupery (Based on “Southern Mail”, “Night Flight” and “Wind, Sand and Stars”) Sofi ia A. Andreeva and Yana G. Gerasimenok* Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041, Russia Received 17.02.2016, received in revised form 16.03.2016, accepted 02.04.2016 This article is devoted to the analysis of a pilot’s character in the works of A. de Saint-Exupery in the context of mythopoetics and the archetype of a cultural hero. <...> Being a professional pilot he described true events and created a heroic and mainly mythologized character of a pilot. <...> In his works there are such functions of a cultural hero as fi ghting with nature or mythical beasts, breaking new ways, formation of human society. <...> There are also motifs of initiation, magic transition to another world, death and rebirth. <...> They created drawings of fl ying machines, conducted experiments, dreams of fl ying were realized in the legends and myths, and the most famous of them is the myth of Icarus. <...> Even at the beginning of the 20th century, at the dawn of aviation, when fl ights already became reality, they still were a magical phenomenon in the public consciousness: “people could not understand that a heavy winged machine controlled by a man could fl y through the air” (Zheltova, 2008, 165). © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: annarenar@mail.ru, andreeva.sofi a@mail.ru # 1074 # Due to the dangerous and unusual nature of this profession romanticization of pilots in the fi rst half of the 20th century has led to the fact that the pilot’s character became mythologized and acquired the features of exclusivity. <...> Aviation is a key theme in all his books, except for the last Sofi ia A. Andreeva and Yana G. Gerasimenok. <...> Theoretical grounds From the earliest times myth pervaded human life and all its aspects. <...> Myth embodied views on the external world, on relations within the human society, on the daily lives of people; for example, the emergence of the ancient settlement “was always surrounded by myths, legitimization of its existence occurred through the myth of foundation, belief <...>