Representation of Men in Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s Short Stories

2022

The article deals with the categories of "artistic image" and "artistic female image". The authors aim to consider the representation of woman's topic in Russian and Kazakh literature in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, as well as to trace the transformation of the image of "unequal woman" into the image of "free woman" / "Soviet woman". The artistic works of A. Chekhov help to recreate the cultural atmosphere of the end of the era. His author's view reflects the literary situation on the threshold of the new millennium. The study of peculiarities of the artistic world in the creative works of B. Maylin helps to identify the essential features inherent in the Soviet prose at the initial stage. The works of these authors are characterized by a high degree of detalization, which contributes to the most complete and comprehensive disclosure of the artistic image of the woman. The extensive gallery of literary types of heroes presented in the works of the writers allows to reveal the author's position in their portrayal, the peculiarities of the use of situations and social conditions in which these heroines are forced to exist. The female characters are explored through the analysis of portrait description, the nature of actions, the inner world, its transformation, as well as the analysis of the stylistic features of the description of the psychology of behaviour. In order to carry out the analysis, the authors completed a number of tasks, which include finding and identifying the female characters of works of small genre (short stories, novels), classifying the female characters, their behavior and actions. The above allows the authors to draw conclusions not only about the ways of depicting female characters in the works of writers, but also to note some points of continuity of A. Chekhov's creative originality by B. Maylin. The ability to reveal the inner world of characters, filigree use of artistic details are common features of the works of talented prose writers and playwrights innovators. Studying the female characters and their psychological aspects the authors of the article used methods of comparative, historical and typological, object-analytical, textological and comprehensive analysis, as well as the method of systematization of the data obtained.

Pub. In the proceedings of The Russian Discourse in the Contemporary Intercultural Context, an International Conference organized by the Department of Slavonic & Finno-Ugrian Studies, University of Delhi, New Delhi during 1-2 March, 2012 in New Delhi., 2013

This study is an attempt to analyse the use of simile in the modern Ukrainian fiction discourse from the gender perspective based on the research corpus. Simile is the verbalization of the cognitive operation of comparison based on the experience of person's communication with the world. The use of corpus data is essential for obtaining relevant results. For example, our previous case studies of the modern Ukrainian discourse allowed us to debunk a series of statements of certain researchers concerning the limitations imposed by the category of gender on the use of similes. The study of similes will enable us to draw conclusions about the conceptual and linguistic picture of the world of modern men and women, as well as provide the empirical evidence needed to analyse the changes in the linguistic pictures of the world. Analysis of verbalized similes can help us make conclusions concerning attributes of particular concepts in the male and female pictures of the world. What is at issue here is not the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity but rather the identification of the spheres of concepts verbalized by women and men through similes, as well as spheres of concepts becoming sources of terms for verbalization. The research corpus in the framework of this study contains prose fiction of female authors ("The Life of Makar" by Liuko Dashvar, "The Museum of Abandoned Secrets" by Oksana Zabuzhko, "The Notes of Ukrainian Madman" by Lina Kostenko, "Escort to Death", "Withered Flowers Get Tossed Out", and "Playing with Beads" by Iren Rozdobudko) and male authors ("Twelve Rings" by Yuri Andruhovych, "The Tango of Death" and "Spring Games in the Autumn Gardens" by Yurii Vynnychuk, "A Bit of Darkness" and “Yakiv's Head” by Liubko Deresh, "Big Mac and Other Stories: short story collection" and "Depeche Mode" by Serhiy Zhadan, "Elemental" by Vasyl Shkliar). The subcorpora of "male" and "female" prose comprise approximately 420 thousand tokens each. With the help of AntConc3.2.4w application, concordances for such conjunctions as як, наче, неначе, мов, немов, мовби were generated. Hand-sorted lists of similes and simile constructions were formed: 1680 units found in the texts of female authors and 1003 units in those of male authors. Quantitative evidence proves a significant asymmetry in the use of similes by women and men. Analysis of the spheres of concepts verbalized by means of similes and spheres of concepts which are the sources for the terms similes are based on made it possible to draw preliminary conclusions about the differences in linguistic pictures of the world of modern men and women, to analyse their axiological orientations, to determine the degree of linguistic creativity of women and men. The processed methodology of investigation will become the basis for further studies of linguistic pictures of the world of men and women, since the detected quantitative asymmetry can be compensated for on a verbal level by using other units. In addition, the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the phenomena under observation are to be clarified using wider evidence base.

Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska, sectio FF – Philologiae

Slavic Review, 2018

This study explores the ways in which Russian women writers responded to Sentimentalist conventions of authorship, challenging their conceptualisation of women as mute and passive beings. Its particular focus is on the works by Anna Naumova, Mariia Pospelova and Mariia Bolotnikova, three late-18 th-and early-19 thcentury Russian women authors who have only recently begun to receive some slight scholarly attention from Western European researchers in Russian Women's Studies. The study not only provides a close literary analysis of the writings by these women, it also applies political, social, and feminist theory, examining both the pitfalls and the opportunities encountered by women authors operating in the context of a Sentimentalist culture of feminisation strongly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings. It argues that, while restricting women to essentialist conceptions, Sentimentalist discourse also offered female authors a means of acquiring symbolic authority, enabling them to claim social equality by appropriating the Sentimentalist re-evaluation of nature and the notion of natural rights. As they created self-images as authors, legitimising their writerly activities, provincial women writers in particular referred to their alleged closeness to nature. Excluded from the public sphere of politics by Sentimentalist culture, women also took advantage of the movement's focus on and elevated appreciation of the home and the family to draw attention to concerns of a more private nature. By examining literature produced at a time when Romantic ideals began to eclipse Sentimentalist aesthetics, the study illustrates the challenge of the Sentimentalist notion of women by several Russian women and their authoritative, autonomous and/or outspoken female characters.

2004

Gender and byt (everyday life) in post-Stalinist culture stem from tacit conceptions linking the quotidian to women. During the Thaw and Stagnation the posited egalitarianism of Soviet rhetoric and pre-exiting conceptions of the quotidian caused critics to use byt as shorthand for female experience and its literary expression. Addressing the prose of Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova, they connected the everyday to banality, reduced scope, ateleological time, private life, and anomaly. The authors, for their part, relied on selective representation of the quotidian and a chronotope of crisis to hesitantly address taboo subjects. During perestroika women's prose reemerged in the context of social turmoil and changing gender roles. The appearance of six literary anthologies gave women authors and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in particular a new visibility. Female writers employed discourse and a broadened chronotope of crisis, along with the era's emphasis on exposure, negation, and systematic critique, to challenge gender roles. Both supporters and opponents of women's literature now directly addressed its relation to gender instead of using byt as a euphemism. From 1991 to 2001 women's prose solidified its status as a recognized part of Russian high literature. Liudmila Ulitskaia and Svetlana Vasilenko employed a transhistorical temporality that was based on the family and offered an indirect critique of history through representation of women's byt.

ShodhKosh: Journal of Visual and Performing Arts

This paper examines the paradigm shift in the genre of Russian horror short stories, and this tectonic shift is exemplified by a parallel reading of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Black Coat”. The juxtaposition of these two stories exposes how male writers have always been placed on a pedestal in the Russian literary canon. In contrast, this paper highlights how the contributions of their female counterparts have been constantly sidelined, though both streams of works enriched the vast field of the Russian literary empire. Narratology theory is used to highlight the narrative techniques of both authors since it examines what narratives share and what makes them unique. This is illustrated by demonstrating how writers like Petrushevskya have dismantled the common notion that only male writers contribute to the technical aspects of a genre. Using the comparative methodology, this paper also traces the tradition of this genre and the holistic perspect...

Russian Review, 2021

This article examines the issue of realist literary narration portrayed as male privilege in Russian women’s writing of the 1860s, specifically in Avdot’ia Panaeva’s novel A Woman’s Lot (Zhenskaia dolia). A Women’s Lot was published in 1862, under Panaeva’s male pen name Nikolai Stanitskii, and, taking advantage of this indeterminacy of gender, Panaeva’s narrator alternated between its male and a female narrative personas. I argue that Panaeva used this self-consciously transgressive narrative voice to challenge the gendered aesthetic conventions of contemporary relist writing. Employing the theory of “narrative transvestism,” this article demonstrates how Panaeva’s narrator borrowed the male voice of authority, at the same time exposing its limitations. In A Woman’s Lot, Panaeva discussed the subject of realist narration in a wider framework of male privilege in society and the arts, negotiating her text’s problematic status as a realist narrative created by a woman writer.

RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi , 2022

Having its roots in faiths such as Judaism and Christianity, the term ‘patriarchy’ refers to a system of authority in which males are regarded as superior to females and wield power over them. While some women have submissively internalized the patriarchal system, others have raised their voices and spoken out against it. Short stories written by women writers are one way to examine this system. However, there is a wide disparity in these authors' attitudes toward women. Some depict brave new women who transform and progress as the narrative goes on, while others feature stereotypical female figures who are submissive. The purpose of this paper is to compare the short stories written by Kate Chopin and Rose Tremain to those by Edith Wharton and Clare Boylan in order to determine whether or how much these authors criticize the patriarchal system. It is argued that Chopin and Tremain are the most critical of patriarchy, whereas Wharton and Boylan represent women within a patriarchal framework. Both Chopin and Tremain provide a comprehensive analysis of human nature, regardless of whether they are discussing men or women, with all of their complexity and inner struggles. Authors such as Wharton and Boylan, on the other hand, depict women in patriarchal societies in their natural state, without offering any solutions or suggestions. In their accounts, societal or sexual injustice is motivated by financial considerations.

Bulletin of Science and Practice, 2019

This article is devoted to the urgent problem of women and society at all times. As in many areas, this issue is also one of the main objects of literature. The purpose of the article is the place of women of the East in society and the study of the reflection of this issue in fiction and a comparative interpretation of their common and distinctive features. The article also covers and analyzes the views of outstanding educators-the scholar Ismail Gaspirinsky and the famous Iranian writer Shahrnush Porsipur about a woman and her place in society and family, her duties and rights. Аннотация. Данная статья посвящается актуальной во все времена проблеме женщины и общества. Во многих сферах этот вопрос также является одним из основных объектов литературы. Цель статьи: место женщин Востока в обществе и изучение отражения этого вопроса в художественной литературе, сравнительная интерпретация их общих и отличительных черт. Статья также охватывает и анализирует взгляды выдающихся просветителей: ученого Исмаила Гаспиринского и известной иранской писательницы Шахрнуш Порсипур о женщине и ее месте в обществе и семье, ее обязанностях и правах.