Introduction. The article is devoted to the study of V. M. Shukshin's creativity in the aspect of fairy-tale tradition. The introduction gives the concept of fairy-tale tradition and its development in two directions. The realization of the fairy-tale tradition in the Russian literature of the XIX century is shown. If before the tale was the lot of people, primarily peasant audience and existed in oral form, but since the late XVIII – early XIX century it, becoming the property of an educated society, entered into literature and found a new life in it. The stages of studying the creativity of V. M. Shukshin, the main directions of research thought are revealed. Purpose: to identify the influence of the folk tale genre on the work of V. M. Shukshin. Materials and methods: comparative-typological, comparativehistorical and literary methods of research were used. Results, discussion. V. M. Shukshin, along with the use of fairy-tale motifs and images, restores the very structure of the fairy-tale text in his works. The writer adopts the fairy-tale tradition through the prism of M. Gorky’s creativity, borrows his principle of living style and the symbiosis of short stories and tales, offering new genre forms of oral narrative. V. M. Shukshin, as a writer close to the people, follows the fairy-tale tradition in order to more clearly convey the national psychology and reflect the worldview of the common man. Conclusion. The writer, like his predecessors, on the one hand, introduces fairy-tale elements into realistic works, restores the structure of the fairy-tale text with the help of repetitions of key words and creates his own fairy-tales, adapting them to modern reality. Thus, the fairy tale is the “matrix” of Shukshin’s text, revealing in an accessible form the ongoing or supposed events described by the author.