Image of urban civilization in late stories by V.M. Shukshin: mimetic and semantic aspects

The article deals with the image of civilization as it appears in different periods ofcreativity of V.M. Shukshin. The advantage in the analysis is given to mature and late texts of thewriter as most representative in terms of the stated theme.The image of the city, which is created in the minds of the characters, the narrator and the authoris analysed. The concept of modern civilization is seen in several ways: symbols of things that arepresent in the village and "contextually" refer to the image of the city (most often it is television, radio,abaci, books that establish relations or settle scores); stable motives and loci, which are filledunequally in different periods of art.In the early texts the city is "a different world", the idea of which lives in the minds of allcharacters, it is only the background, shading the problems of rural life, preserving self-worth. Acritical attitude to the city is formed by the mid-1960s, the question arises about the price of goods ofcivilization, the loss of the village's own face. The problem of "town − village" comes to be seen in theexistential aspect of the person's choice not of the place to live, but life's journey. The criteria thatguide the person are analysed. The town is an opportunity of testing, meeting with the different,through the relations with this comes self-knowledge. At the opposite axis are urban intellectualsassociated with high achievements of progress, and officials of ministers, who found comfort inphilistine. Between these extremes lies the road of the hero-traveller. The final period of Shukshin'swork − the beginning of the 1970s − is marked by special concentration on the theme of civilization.Recent villagers quickly adapt to the culture media, follow someone else's models; the city casts aspell; the temptation becomes universal.The paper analyses the major urban toposes in the art of Shukshin: bureau/office,pharmacy/hospital, shop/restaurant, house/apartment, hotel/hostel, exhibition and circus. In addition,loci were marked that are functionally identical to crossroads: buses, cars, airplanes. Movement withina civilization is organised by using "wonderful things" − prescriptions, certificates, banknotes, whichopen the right door before the petitioner.The conclusions are made that the town as a chronotope is implemented in the short stories byShukshin in several directions: the arrival of a villager in the town and the related personality tests;methods of development of the anti-world in all the diversity of its representations. The projections ofworlds are aligned in accordance with the spiritual experience, goals of the narrator and characters; thesame space is given different characteristics. The author understands existence as the eternalmovement of forms, dictating the absence of clear boundaries between phenomena and spaces. Thesecret character exists on the borders; he is in constant motion; he belongs to the element of time, andbasically he has no roots. The key idea of the author is the idea of the unity of Russia, searching formethods of communication that would connect a villager, his fellow-countryman, who moved to thecity, and a true intellectual.

Keywords

Authors

References