The focus of our discussion is the cognitive study of time in the story “Put’ osla” by Ludmila Ulitskaya. Cognitive literary studies are a new interdisciplinary approach in the analysis of fiction. We consider most important the employment of the cognitive approach in analyzing texts of fiction as a particular type of man’s mental activity. Applying the conception of cognitive linguistics we can reveal the conceptual models existing in the author’s consciousness and understand the mechanisms of modelling the reader’s consciousness. Actively manipulating the time, combining its archetypal and new models, constructing the dichotomy temporary–eternal, using the time as an instrument of magic the author awakens the archetype of Christmas in the characters’ consciousness and creates an evaluative model of modernity – the epoch of postmodernism. The explication of the linguo-cognitive information of the story enables us to reveal the world of a second level or the so-called textual world. Thus the reader is given an opportunity of his own interpretation which results in intertextuality characteristic for the postmodern aesthetics. Reviving in mind the archetype of Christmas the characters of the story are seeking a miracle but no miracle takes place because the time is inappropriate. Ulitskaya shows the reality of her time and the modern man in it.