The paper examines a collection of short stories by the Russian writer Nikolai Alexandrovich Krasheninnikov (1878–1941) Shadows of Love, which was published in 1915. According to critics, in his stories Krasheninnikov draws the “dreary path” of heroes who come to life at the moment of meeting with deceptive illusions. The collection’s author builds a whole system of male and female perception of relationships, using a fairly simple formula, characteristic of modernist works in which the hero or heroine is tested by betrayal or jealousy. According to Krasheninnikov, both a woman and a man who find themselves in a situation of adultery exist in an active-passive Vestnik slavianskikh kul’tur. 2024. Vol. 71 Philological sciences 167 paradigm of dependence on invented relationships (both the traitor and the one who is being cheated, and active principle can awaken in a woman, and passive becomes a companion of a man, depending on the chosen role. It is noteworthy that for a woman in Krasheninnikov’s stories, adultery is seen, first of all, as one of the manifestations of female rebellion in a patriarchal society, even if marital relations are not abusive for a woman. Opened betrayal or suspicion of it destroys masculine perception of the world, no matter how it was created, through a priori unequal marriage or loving relationships. The motif of adultery yields to the theme of a man’s search for illusory love, both in the opening and closing story of the cycle, which indicates the desire of author to both find one’s way to the essence of intersexual relations and catch the elusive “mood of love” with one stroke, which is typical for a short story genre (collection dedicated to A.P. Chekhov). The Poetics of the stories is built not so much on the antithesis of the manifestation of feminine and masculine principles, but on a preliminary attempt to reveal the psychology of sex, continued by the author in the novels of the 1910–1920s.