«Russian Man on Rendezvous»: the Conflict of the Male and Female in the Stories by V.M. Shukshin

Abstract

The author of the article analyzes one of the central motives of short stories by V.M. Shukshin (rendezvous) to consider the issue of gender confrontation in the creative view of the writer. Some methods of psycho-poetics areapplied the research. Masculine and feminine in the works by Shukshin have various and sometimes contradictory relationship: from irreconcilable confrontation, hostility to the interchangeability and interdependence. In almost every essay, the writer conveys some tense, cautious, or even skeptical attitude to woman. Woman for Shukshin’s character (the character, as a rule, is implicitly correlated with the author) is always a mystery and a subject of his spiritual experiences. Apart from philosophical, mythological, and cultural aspects of understanding the opposition ‘male / female’, psychological interpretation is the is crucial one, because the problem of being sick at heart, the search for the ideal and the meaning of life in the works by Shukshin are often solved in the context of natural logic of paradoxical psychological antipodes interdependence – male and female.The relationship of Shukshin’s character with a woman is always complicated. It may be determined by the fact that reconstruction of archetypal feminine in the character’s mentality is marked by a parasemantic feature and ambivalence: woman is mother, nature, life; woman is a spiritual ideal; woman is a demonic creature, cunning and deceitful who distracts man from the real life values.