Anthropological function of space in the B. K. Zaytsev’s short prose of the 1920s

The paper considers the features of incarnating women’s images in B. K. Zaytsev’s short prose of the 1920s, reveals their aesthetic originality conditioned by the spatial organization of his works. The emigrant Paris is depicted as a harmonious unbroken space with the topos of a «home», where a woman is perceived as part of an ordered cosmos, is endowed with a divine appearance and a character that is far from being practical. This female image is created by an active use of the means of image-bearing expressiveness as well as of pagan allusions. The space of Soviet Russia, by contrast, appears as apocalyptic, devoid of any values. On the principle of correspondence to this medium, in the story «Avdotia-death» the author creates an expressly anti-aesthetic female image that embodies the traditional Slavic conceptions about the death, while in the novel «Anna» the image of the heroine contrasts with reality and is therefore doomed.

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