Женские образы в прозе В. М. Шукшина

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of female characters in minor genres of V. M. Shukshin’s prose. The aim of this research is to reveal the features of depicting a female character in V. M. Shukshin’s creative work by the examples of the stories ‘Snowball Berry Red’, ‘Light Souls’, ‘Tough Man’, ‘Mother’s Heart’, ‘Stepka’s Love’, ‘The Sun, Old Man and Girl’, ‘Unscrupulous Persons’, ‘Wife Saw off Her Husband to Paris’, ‘Queer Fish’. This paper is novel in that the female characters in V. M. Shukshin’s prose have been generalized and classified. The questions of developing female characters are discussed in the article. As a result, it has been identified that the female characters shown in V. M. Shukshin’s prose can be divided into the ideal, the traditional, the progressive and the vulgar types. These female characters not only influence directly or indirectly the behaviour and the lives of the main characters of the stories and novellas but they turn out to be a transmitter of the author’s humanistic values which demonstrate the writer’s attraction to a moral ideal of a woman who combines the features of a wife, a mother and a homemaker.