Women’s communicative practices and traditional lifestyles in Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens her Eyes and Lu Xun’s The New Year Sacrifice

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This article examines communicative practices characterising the system of traditional lifestyles of women in China and Russia. Referring to comparative analysis of the novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes by Guzel Yakhina and the short story The New Year Sacrifice by Lu Xun, the authors define the basic types and characteristics of communication of women with their social surrounding, family, and nature. They include social and sacral communicative practices based on social and ethnocultural values and ethno-psychological attitudes. The authors reveal the dual character of ethnocultural tradition forming women’s lifestyle studying constructive and destructive aspects of women’s communicative practices. Women’s characters are studied as examples of the transformation of the traditional lifestyle within the context of conflicting relations between the old traditional norms and new socio-cultural realities and various types of social prohibitions and penalties (to the extent of sanctioned abuse). The works by Guzel Yakhina and Lu Xun reveal parallel trends in the artistic representation of basic cha­racteristics of cultural traditions regulating women’s activities in family and society and similar ethical and psychological features of both main characters. The article studies two levels of women’s communicative practices realisation: “husband — wife”, and “son — mother”. It is emphasised that the works under study both represent women’s communicative practices not only as verbal activity, but as a description of various types on non-verbal communication (touching, gestures, positions), which is more important for the image of a mother. The article examines the realisation of women’s communicative scenarios, such as the “standard scenario”, “scenario of finding meaning” and “scenario of losing meaning”.