Vasily Shukshin Research Articles

Domestic and Existential in Stories of Vasily Shukshin and Boris Yekimov

The shared worldview of the so-called “village” writers often obscures the questions regarding their differing evaluations of social reality, interpretations of historical changes, and understandings of humanity’s place in the world. In this context, the task of comparative analysis of their similar artistic solutions appears both relevant and novel. This article examines the case of different scales of a seemingly analogous plot situation. The stories analyzed are Vasily Shukshin’s “The Boots” and Boris Yekimov’s “A Pair of Autumn Shoes”. It is demonstrated that the protagonists of Shukshin and Yekimov manifest themselves within narratives of varying existential intensity, addressing distinct challenges. Despite the apparent similarity in plots, their narrative differences are evident. Shukshin’s characters understand how life should be, yet often deviate from their ideals, fearing kindness; thus, in the writer’s world, the existential is frequently devalued. Vasily Shukshin, who captures the disintegration of the existential within the hero’s inner world, illustrates in “The Boots” that overcoming the mundane is an act of heroism and a personal triumph. Conversely, Boris Yekimov places fundamentally different emphases: within a superficially similar situation, he addresses a transpersonal challenge. The essence of the plot realized in “A Pair of Autumn Shoes” serves to remind readers of spiritual and communal values that may be lost amid everyday concerns.

National identity in the context of historical trauma in the stories of Vasily Shukshin

In the era of globalization and cultural interaction, the themes of national identity and historical trauma gain prominence in literature. Vasily Shukshin, an esteemed Russian writer and filmmaker, adeptly addresses these themes through his portrayal of the Russian countryside and the lives of ordinary people. His works provide a deep understanding of cultural interactions and the effects of globalization on individuals and society. Shukshin explores complex issues of human existence, such as the search for meaning, the struggle to preserve tradition, and resistance to cultural assimilation. His storytelling offers valuable insights into contemporary global challenges, making his work highly relevant for literary studies.This article presents a literary analysis of Vasily Shukshin's short stories, with a focus on how themes of national identity and historical trauma influence the narrative and character development. The research is innovative in its approach, intertwining these themes to assess their impact on character formation and plot progression. It highlights Shukshin's significant contributions to Russian literature and his role in elucidating Russian national identity and historical memory.The study finds that national identity in Shukshin's works is deeply intertwined with the culture and traditions of the Russian village, while historical trauma reflects the repercussions of significant events on individuals' lives and consciousness. The interaction of these themes forms unique life stories of the characters, allowing for a deeper understanding of the Russian psyche and its connection to the past. This analysis underscores the importance of Shukshin's works in the context of Russian literature and their contribution to the understanding of Russian national identity and historical memory.

Амплуа и архетип в театральной сказке В. М. Шукшина

The paper presents a thorough examination of the character structure in the theatrical fairy tale created by Vasily Shukshin. The analysis of the theatrical characters results in an attempt to substantiate a specific approach to the artistic comprehension and visual content of the the-atrical character. This approach is based on the canonical system of roles and the invariants of the archetype. The early stage of the writer’s creativity is characterized by the search for artistic identity, with the focus on developing the character, bringing the hero and the creator closer. However, in the later period, Shukshin takes a different approach by distancing himself from the hero. The rejection of literary characters in favor of roles in “Point of view” marks an exit from the zone of social conflicts into the space of aesthetic issues. Contrasting accents in identical roles are used to counterpoint the neutral position of the author, instantly discoloring and devaluing the plot. This strategy emphasizes the interest in exploring the subjective/objective nature of an artistic image and the essence of character. The next step taken in “Before the third cocks” is to transform and rethink the character plan. Instead of being simplified, the characters are condensed to an archetype. This allows the artist to make anthropological generalizations, placing a Person in the center of philosophical and aesthetic discourse, surpassing the limitations of eccentric and “unsolved” individuals.

The Christian Idea in the Soviet Literature

Contrary to common belief, Russian literature of the Soviet period was never a “waste of time” for our culture. No socialist realism could tear it completely off from the Orthodox worldview and the classical Russian literature. As for the works of that period written with the hidden agenda, they have long since been duly forgotten. In the Soviet years, the reality of the so-called literary process appeared to be distorted: there were books that received prizes, and other books that people read and discussed. Time, however, straightens everything and puts things in their proper place. The works of writers who felt that they belonged to the great Russian literature stand out clearly from the political and social framework of this historical period. They are, in essence, a bridge from the pre-revolutionary Orthodox culture to our time. We can be fi rmly justifi ed in saying that the literature of the Soviet period was hardly the “bearer of the Christian message”. And yet, to call it entirely anti-Christian would be equally wrong. The author of the article researches this phenomenon through the works by Andrey Platonov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Rubtsov and Vasily Shukshin. The article examines the works of these authors, and reveals their hidden Christian or close enough character, ideas, images and moods. In general, even taking into account the necessary reverence to the system, the Soviet literature in its best representation was a worthy continuation of the classic Russian one. Sadly, the current literature in our country has not yet managed to become even a remote successor of the Soviet literature.

Изучение произведений Василия Шукшина в китайском литературоведении

The subject of this work is the main themes and ideas of Russian country prose – the school that most fully reflects the essence of the Russian national mentality. Ethical issues are an integral part of the works of Vasily Shukshin. V. Shukshin’s novellas represent the wisdom, virtue and life experience of a Russian villager, an attempt is made to identify the spiritual foundations. Writers strive to find the foundations of the peasant world. Vasily Shukshin’s works are known not only in Russia, but all over the world. At the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, V. Shukshin’s novellas were also translated into Chinese and had a significant impact on the work of modern Chinese fiction writers of the new era. During the period of social transformations in China and the Soviet Union, a large number of peasants left the village and rushed to the cities, while their lands were abandoned, and the very attitude of man to the land changed. These processes could not but disturb the writers of the two countries, reflecting in their works on the relationship between man and nature, on national historical memory, on the connection between tradition and modernity. Thus, the question of studying the reception of V. Shukshin’s creativity in China seems to be very up-to-date. The historical and biographical methods provide a key to understanding the author’s content of such national Russian concepts as ‘home’, ‘melancholy’, ‘soul’, ‘conscience’, ‘fate’ and demonstrate the views of Chinese literary scholars on the oeuvre of Russian writers of this school. The works of Chinese literary critics are introduced into the scientific circulation.

The system of points of view in Vasily Shukshin's short stories

The purpose of the work is to explore the point of view in Vasily Shukshin's short stories in its systematic and diverse manifestation. Topicality is provided by the exceptional significance of this category in narratology. The study of the point of view based on the material of short stories by Vasily Shukshin has been conducted for the first time. The article briefly traces the history of scientific understanding of the category of point of view in foreign and Russian philology and notes the variety of approaches and definitions in the formulation of the concept. The authors use the classification of Boris Uspenskij for analysis and consider the point of view in Vasily Shukshin's short stories in psychological, ideological (evaluative), spatial-temporal and phraseological terms. The positions of Boris Korman, Yuri Lotman, Wolf Schmid and Franz Karl Stanzel also take into account. The authors note the features of Vasily Shukshin's narration that affect the expression of the point of view in the text. Vasily Shukshin's short stories are characterised by a dynamic and frequent change of points of view, which indicates the technique of “montageˮ and similarities in this regard with cinematic techniques. The conclusions generalise the variety of ways and forms of expression of the point of view in the studied artistic material. The point of view in the considered stories is characterised by variability in the correlation of subjects of speech and subjects of consciousness, alternation of external and internal points of view, mutual transitions from one to the other, text interference and other hybrid phenomena.

Glushakov, P. (2018). Shukshin and others: Articles, materials, commentaries. St. Petersburg: Rostok. (In Russ.)

Glushakov’s book joins in the polemic about the status of Vasily Shukshin in 20th-c. Russian literature. The reviewer argues that it was Shukshin’s prose that gave voice to the hitherto unknown and disturbingly unusual stratum of the Russian people. He further points out that the book draws hardly any parallels between Shukshin and his predecessor Gorky. It is also argued that the compiler of the tome chose to forego a detailed examination of Shukshin’s numerous ties with world literature. Therefore, P. Glushakov’s opus seems a product of a respite, defined by renewed interest in Shukshin’s works and enthusiastic search by the post-Soviet people for a source of the much coveted and needed spiritual revival. Glushakov’s position appears highly uncertain: he places Shukshin in a hermetic environment with only echoes of his relations with contemporaries and his own spectral image for company.

“Is Vasily Shukshin a Modern Classic?” (Review of the Round Table Discussion at St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum)

“Is Vasily Shukshin a Modern Classic?” (Review of the Round Table Discussion at St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum)

Particle “just” in the Vasily Shukshin’s stories

This article is dedicated to examination of the particle just” in the Vasily Shukshin’s stories. Analysis is conducted on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic properties of the particle “just”. The object of this research is the particle “just” in the stories of V. Shukshin. The subject is the syntagmatic and paradigmatic properties of the particle “just”. The goal of this study consists in the comprehensive description of the meaning system of the particle “just”, its synonyms and concurrence in the stories of V. Shukshin. The research methodology contains descriptive method with application of the method of contextual analysis, quantitative method, and comparative method. The following conclusions were acquired: in the stories of V. Shukshin, the particle “just” most often is used to highlight the concurrence of situations in time or space; there are instances of combination of meanings of the particle “just”; the particle “just” has no limitations in compatibility. The scientific novelty is defined by the fact that the author is first to analyze the utilization of the particle “just” in the works of a single author; as well as determine the instances of utilization that are not described in the dictionaries.

“IS VASILY SHUKSHIN A MODERN CLASSIC?” (Review of the Round Table Discussion at St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum)

“IS VASILY SHUKSHIN A MODERN CLASSIC?” (Review of the Round Table Discussion at St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum)

Destiny. Character. Soul-Baring. A panel discussion marking the 90th anniversary of Vasily Shukshin

A publication of the materials from the panel discussion marking the 90th anniversary of the outstanding Russian writer V. Shukshin. Participating in the event were authors and literary critics A. Bolshev, A. Varlamov, E. Vodolazkin, P. Glushakov, I. Esaulov, M. Kucherskaya, Z. Niva, I. Sukhikh, M. Tarkovsky, M. Chudakova, L. Chudnova, and E. Shukshina. Varying in size and genres, the contributions (essays, archival documents, reminiscences, and interpretations) discuss Shukshin’s artistic phenomenology and reveal unique features of his poetics, which confirm the relation of his prose to the traditions of Russian and European literature. Included in the collection after a 45-year delay is a poem mourning Shukshin’s death. Further in the section one can find critical reviews of his works. A keen reader will notice a certain repetition of Shukshin’s ‘quotation’ and imagery in the works by different contributors. A special focus is given to the topic of ‘Shukshin and modernity’.

The concept of personality of Vasily Shukshin in the biography novel by Aleksey Varlamov "Shukshin"

The article discusses the concept of personality of Vasily Shukshin in the biography novel by Aleksey Varlamov in the context of the tradition of this genre in Russian literature, formed in creative work of Boris Zaytsev, Vladislav Khodasevich, Nina Berberova etc. The aim of the study is to analyse the characteristic of the typological principles of the genre in the artistic world of the modern writer and literary critic Aleksey Varlamov. The subject of study is the representation of the conceptual components of Vasily Shukshin's personality in the biography novel genre. The main attention is paid to the theme of Vasily Shukshin's dramatic fate, the motives of the writer's opposition to that time's power. The author's version of the "reading" of Vasily Shukshin's personality, which is slightly different from the textbook one, is analysed. As a result of the study, the conclusions about the specifi cs of the development of the biography novel genre in the works of Aleksey Varlamov, about the author's method of artistic research of the writer's biography in the system of "code of fate" of a Russian, the main motives of his life.

Герменевтические подступы к русской литературе

The article is devoted to the search for a new space in the methodological studies on Russian literature. The author takes as its basis the method of hermeneutics of words by Vardan Hayrapetyan. Especially the basic categories such as the world man (homo mundi), the Other and its variants: the self (rus. самость), otherness (rus. дру­гость), the alien (rus. чужесть) and two triads, which postulate two types of intellectual situations. In this regard, the author identifies the concept of the hybrid man of the hero of Russian literature in which a small person is a representative of an impersonal collective personality of the world man, home, family, ideas, etc. The author demonstrates the type of a hybrid man on the example of the protagonist of the novel by Vasily Shukshin Stepan Razin.

How Vasily Shukshin Celebrated the Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution

How Vasily Shukshin Celebrated the Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution

Об одном инвариантном мотиве движения в поэтике В. М. Шукшина

This paper focuses on Vasily Shukshin’s “working records” dated from 1966. It is established that a lot of contexts and names are important for the interpretation of these records: from the antique myths to Russian literature. In the paper, it is proved that the motive of the waterway of a ship appears in Shukshin’s texts as the concentrated symbol of spiritual aspirations, warm rushes, as the allegory of movement towards the aim and the overcoming of obstacles. At the same time, it is also a symbol of moral ascension, which is shown by the reflections about intelligence as the aim of the artist. The conclusion drawn is that the poetics of Vasily Shukshin’s texts represents a very open and dialogical structure with wide referential installations.

Vasili Šukšinin omaperäinen sanasto suomentajan jäljiltä

This article explores Finnish translations of Vasily Shukshin’s idiosyncratic prose that largely relies on dialogue and teems with dialectal expressions. Our aim is to test the common assumption that texts containing regionalisms or informal vocabulary often become flattened, i.e. less colorful and expressive in translation. Evidence of such flattening would offer corroboration for the translation universal known as standardization. To test the hypothesis, we compiled a monolingual corpus of ca. 672,000 words, consisting of 138 texts by Shukshin. The lexemes typical of Shukshin were identified with the help of MyStem, software for morphological analysis. The program’s lemmatizer indicated 21,295 words as unrecognizable; these words are thus very probably infrequent in Russian texts in general and typical of Shukshin’s writing. For this article, we further delimited the material to six short stories that appear both in our corpus and in the bilingual ParRus corpus compiled by Mikhail Mikhailov, with approximately 200 idiosyncratic lexemes. The frequencies of these lexemes were compared to information derived from relevant frequency counts. While the methodology needs to be refined and the corpus expanded, the initial analysis does provide some evidence of conventionalization, particularly in the Finnish translation of a story depicting a child’s language usage.

Cognitive Approach to Metaphor Translation in Literary Discourse

In this paper, a cognitive approach to metaphor translation in literary discourse is used, with a reference to a collection of short stories by a famous Russian writer Vasily Shukshin (1929-1974) and their translations in English. The study presented is focused on the analysis of the anthropomorphous metaphor, in particular the conceptual mapping between MAN and NATURE concepts described contrastively in source and target texts. The theoretical framework relies on the cognitive approach to metaphor, most notably on Mandelblit's (1995) Cognitive Translation Hypothesis.

La semántica arcaica de Vasilij Shukshin - sobre el material de su poema «Это было давно...»

Vasily Shukshin verses never before weren't considered by researchers as a special part of a creative heritage V.M.Shukshin. It speaks first of all rather weak availability of these Shukshin texts, their peripheral functionality in the creative world of the writer; not last role is played here also by an ambiguity with art status of these texts: uncertainty of the initial text, the date atribution, and also revealing of borders of the text as that, definition of degree of its completeness etc. represents difficult and for the present not cleared problem. Meanwhile, in these texts the difficult archaic structure of positioning of ideologically-art and poetic layers of the Shukshin text is found out. Deep communication with folklore tradition allows to speak about presence at Shukshin products of elements of the magichesko-religious text as result of literary-church sinkretizm and national-household archaic representations.

Color and Sound in Balzac's Novels

This paper analyzes the dramatic color of Honore de Balzac's novels "Shagreen" (1831) and "Father Goriot" (1834). Using symbolic colors, different color details and motives, color and light accents, decoloration Balzac creates dramatic contrasts, transforms the time, reveals the inner state of the characters. The writer's works are the result of the brilliant application of the reflex theory to literature suggested by Eugene Delacroix, a painter and Balzac's contemporary. Artistic intensity and the diversity of color elements in Balzac's novels are one of the vivid steps on the way to the chromatic and not just color cinema as Eisenstein wrote. The correlation of prose and film was one of the main subjects of Nina Anosova's research. A talented literary and film scholar and teacher, a Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and Histroy Institute (IFLI) graduate, she spent over 55 years teaching at VGIK. Such prominent filmmakers as Marlene Khutsiev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Vasily Shukshin, Gennady Shpalikov, Yuri Arabov, Karen Shakhnazarov, Vadim Abdrashitov, Sergey Loznitsa, etc. were among her pupils. The students and graduates of the Institute of Cinematography constantly turn to her works, learning real (deep) analysis and understanding of literature and art.

Композиционно-речевая структура подтипа нейтрализующихся рассказов-сценок В.М. Шукшина

Композиционно-речевая структура подтипа нейтрализующихся рассказов-сценок В.М. Шукшина