The article deals with the description of the key elements of the conceptual space of the short story A White, White Day by Andrei Tarkovsky, which served as a basis in the key episode of the feature film Mirror. The aim of the research is to reveal and describe the main elements of the conceptual sphere of the short story. The object of research is the short story A White, White Day by Andrei Tarkovsky published in 1970 in the magazine Film Art in Movie Makers' Stories section. The main method

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... used in the framework of the research is conceptual analysis of texts. To reveal the readers' background notions about the short story and the author, to determine the semantics of the title and to reveal keywords on the basis of readers' reception, we also used the experimental data obtained in 2017 when 51 students of Novosibirsk State University were surveyed. The participants were asked to read the information about the text and to answer 2 questions. The first one was asked before reading and was related to information known to the respondents – about the short story and its author and about their associations with the title. The second question (about the text keywords) was asked after reading. The results of the experiment were compared with the results of the analysis of the separate contexts of the short story and the possible intertextual connections, and the verbal representations of the revealed key concepts were compared with the intermedial representations of the key concepts of the feature film Mirror. The following conclusions were made. 1. Even if readers do not know anything about the author of the text, its title and the epigraph create the particular semantic background on which the reception of the short story is superimposed: the notions about the loss of something good, about the mixture of positive and negative emotions, about the fact that the short story is based on the memories. 2. Through the title the individual concept of the white day is introduced into the conceptual space. This concept combines emotionally ambivalent notions about the supreme happiness lost forever, and it goes back to the poetry by Arseny Tarkovsky and Anna Akhmatova. 3. The frequently used lexemes and the short story keywords given to the respondents enable to reveal several key units of the conceptual space of the short story (the concepts of mother, water, childhood, war, wealth, grief, happiness, silence, home, church, fear, memory). 4. The key concepts of the short story are the conceptual basis of the subsequent film Mirror where the conceptual space gets more complicated and is supplemented by some new features.