Vsevolod Garshin's "The R Flower" ("Krasnyi tsvetok" 1883) and Wolfgang Borchert's "The Dandelion" ("Die Hundeblume" 1947) are famous stories with remarkably similar constructions yet as far as I know they have not received a comparative treatment.

Vsevolod Garshin's "The R Flower" ("Krasnyi tsvetok" 1883) and Wolfgang Borchert's "The Dandelion" ("Die Hundeblume" 1947) are famous stories with remarkably similar constructions yet as far as I know they have not received a comparative treatment. In Garshin's story an asylum patient believes a certain number of red poppies are the keeper of the world's evil and he decides to break from his watchful guardians and pick the poppies to save the world. In Borchert's story a prisoner, overpowered from performing any act of self-expression, reaches outside his

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