The Ideological Structure of V. M. Shukshin’s Short Story “Inscape”

Abstract

The story "Inscape" discussed in this article is associated both with the writer's works of fiction and with his epistolary and publicist speeches. The programmatic article “Questions to myself”, written in the same year as the story “Inscape”, raises a sensitive for Shukshin issue of the influence of urban, virtually philistine culture on the rural one. To his mind the problem is that the city drains various kinds of “cultural surrogate” into the village. The story “Inscape” goes about urban fashion designers who include a deliberately provocative element in the fashion show – a demonstration of a beach outfit. They seek to impose a philistine pseudo-culture on the village in the name of establishing modern uninhibited relations. Like many Shukshin’s characters of the late sixties and early seventies, the main character of the story “Inscape”, for whom the cynicism of the townspeople was unacceptable at first, eventually succumbs to temptation.