Image of Church and Architectural Ekphrasis in V. M. Shukshin’s Stories.

Abstract

. Architectural ecphrasis in the poetics of Shukshin's stories, on the one hand, adjoins the anthropocentric chronotope of Russian literature. The locus, and with it the building, becomes an essential part of the semiotics of the landscape or urban environment here: the buildings perform the function of psychological parallelism, responding to the state and experiences of the central characters, completing their portraits as a mandatory frame. On the other hand, architecture in Shukshin's work serves as a kind of means of verbal visualization of the socio-ethical and aesthetic problems of the writer's work that took shape by the end of the 1960s. Shukshin's image of the church is not only anthropological, but also uncommonly physiological. It helps the author partly to sublimate, partly to comprehend his own "cursed" questions: the problem of a break with a small homeland, "progressive" mobility; the problem of "historical" nostalgia, a painful connection with tradition; the problem of creative search, overcoming the disproportions of the professional's "educated" aesthetic taste and naive, direct impression of the layman, continuity and innovation, freedom the artistic idea and the inertia of the material, the technical possibilities of its implementation.