The Gender Semantics of River and Well in Prose of V. Shukshin

Abstract

The creative work of V.M. Shukshin was initially characterized by the uniqueness of the author's idea, which does not allow to attribute explicitly the writer's artistic heritage to any literary trend. In this article, the poetics of the gender  semantics of the river and well in the prose of Shukshin is analyzed. The specificity of Shukshin’s interpretation of the above-noted chronotopes involves not only the nonstandard metaphorical correlation with the images of the main  characters, but also their principal semantic opposition. The writer abandons the traditional interpretation of the well as a symbol of the feminine, giving male semantics to this image. The key characteristics here are static character, secrecy, isolation, contrasted to dynamism and the willfulness of women and the river. Despite the traditional connection with female semantics, which is still found in Shukshin’s texts, the image of the river gets the opposite interpretation by the author. Thus, in the art system of Shukshin, the main criterion determining the correlation of chronotopes with the characters is not gender, but the type of the hero's behavior in the world.