Abstract: The author studies the fiction prose of V.M. Garshin, who was a vivid exponent of the painful issues of his epoch. The main attention is paid to the word "memory" - one of the key words in the writer's works. We find out whether the lexeme "memory" can be attributed to one of the fundamental bases in the prose of Vsevolod Mihailovich Garshin; and whether it is important to take into account the peculiarities of its use in translations of the Russian writer's texts into Chinese, taking into account that in China the interest to Russian literature is only increasing, and translations of Russian writers' works into Chinese have acquired a systematic character. Following the current processes of intercultural dialog, the question of the adequacy of text translation from one language into another arises in parallel. The article uses formal (statistical) analysis, as the work is just a precursor to a serious analysis of semantic variants and hermeneutic possibilities of a word. The analysis of scientific publications, as well as personal experience of reading Garshin's works convinces that such a phenomenon of the writer's artistic world as "word-accent" expressed by lexical forms of the noun "memory" remains outside the circle of study. It is concluded that Garshin's works are mostly built on memories with the key word "memory" and its derivatives. The using of this sign word is subject to the author's intention, it is intensional, characterizes the most important aspects of the writer's artistic world. As for the issue of translational interpretation of the writer's texts, special attention should be paid to the semantic shades of the word, its contextual sounding.