The article examines a text of the modern Russian literature - the story “The Zone” by S. Dovlatov, which has repeatedly been a subject of analysis in literary criticism. However, the paper suggests a new perspective of studying - the intertextual subtext of the story, which, in the authors' opinion, is focused on the creation of metatext, or super-text. The researchers show that Dovlatov deliberately creates a special understanding of the story - not as “camp prose”, but as a super-text giving an idea not so much about the thematic acuteness of the events depicted (prison camp, prohibited zone), but about the place and role of these circumstances in the artist's fate, in the process of image formation.