The paper investigates the process of creating narrative modi of provincial plots. These plots were connected with mass-literature, so they were based on definite narrative patterns, common places and stamps and represented a peculiar «reduction prism», where different narrative modi – satirical, adventure-picaresque, sentimental – come together, are deformed and lose their initial meanings. Contaminating and correcting one another in this contamination, by the 1830s these three modi form the narrative structure of a provincial plot. One can describe their interaction via the linguistic analogy as the relation «denotation – connotations»
The semantic specificity of the provincial plot also determines the narrative modality. So, this problem has both a historico-literary and a theoretico-literary sense. The research on the considered stories of the journal «Contemporary» («Sovremennik») makes it possible to illustrate this thesis and to show a certain correlation between the eventfulness and the specific modality of the plot.