This article examines the perception of belles-lettres works with explicit mythological structures in Ukrainian literature by senior secondary school students. The integral perception of a belles-lettres text depends on the students’ understanding of the author’s mythological figurative language. The aim of the research is to define the problems of children’s perception of mythological structures by classification into levels, and further to propose some ways for improving intelligibility of such texts. The experimental work involved analysis and synthesis, a study of curricula and belles-lettres, and diagnostic questioning. The research was carried out during the academic years 2017- 2018 with 208 pupils in three general education institutions. The analysis corroborates the working hypothesis about the complicated nature of knowledge about the specificity of world outlook within the frame of a certain mythological system.