Peculiarities of the ‘Body – Soul’ Dichotomy in the Collection of Short Stories by Ludmila Ulitskaya The Body of the Soul.

Abstract

The article analyses the works of Lyudmila Ulitskaya from the point of view of a dichotomous description of anthropological reality in her new collection of stories The Body of the Soul. The authors come to original conclusions connected with the author’s mythologism, especially with the two-variant narrative line developed by the author in the previous periods of her creative work. We were able to prove that in the case of one of the variants, in the collection The Body of the Soul, the author actually revealed the nature of her religious and theosophical views. At the same time, we have shown that Ulitskaya’s literary imagination is not confined to the existing schemes of the metaphysical world, but, on the contrary, it helps Ulitskaya to present this world more colourfully and vividly. Sometimes, for the sake of plot integrity, the writer deliberately changes the elements in the mosaic of the conceptosphere employed.