This article considers the urgent problem of literary genre analysis of the modern prose. Under the conditions of overall distrust to an open word, archaic models and plot structures provide a modern writer with an opportunity to speak about the most important matters, avoiding pathos, rhetoric and didactics. The articles studies the works by V. Makanin about the Chechen war based on intuition and movement of free thought of the writer developing in parable forms. Modern parable is a reaction to the word closed in the literary ёeld, on literocentricity; it displays artistic expression in a broader context returning ethical and didactic components to the word. The use of parables leads to almost unlimited opportunities of multi-level reading, it activates the living, intellectual and spiritual experience of the reader to the utmost.