Who Are They, The Heroines of Modern Prose: “Baba bogatyrka”, “Baba with a Pillow” or Business-Lady?

Abstract

Purpose. The article aims to outline the process of modern prose's search for the heroine of the time, to show how the ideas about the woman, her role and purpose have changed in Russian literature of the second half of the 20th –21st century.

Results. The article presents an analysis of the genecratic myth – the myth of the exceptional power and authority that women possess and that allow them to become the center of the social and moral life of society; it traces the change of the type of warrior-woman and protector: from texts of traditionalists to the works of the “inverted generation” and authors of “new realism”. Special attention is paid to the typology of the feminine in the iconic novel of V. Makanin “Underground or Hero of Our Time” (1998), which sums up a peculiar result of the literary search of the bygone century. The author, basing upon the poetics of Gogol and Dostoevsky, offers his typology of the feminine, the extreme positions of which are symbolized by the images of “Baba with a cushion” – a detached, ironic reading of the classical type of “girl embroidering”, the “hearth-keeper”, and the “Aphrodite of the square”, marked by trickster features.

Conclusion. We can distinguish the image of the patriarchal woman, in which the functions of wife and mother are defined. This type is far from being homogeneous, here we can distinguish the image of the old woman with her inherent features of sacrifice, active mercy, humility. The image of the “Baba with a pillow”, brought out in V. Makanin’s famous novel “Underground…”. The image of an intellectual, a businesswoman who ignores the laws of being, striving for the most comfortable, easy life, in the scenario of which mercy, sacrifice, and death do not fit. The image of the “Aphrodite of the Square”, a female-trickster whose underground existence is self-sufficient and self-valuable. The description of the night butterflies is given in contrast to the angelic figures. In the images of the angels, the supraworldliness, the functions of mercy, sacrifice, and testimony are brought to the forefront. The emphasis on the trickster nature of the central characters of the text is dictated by the peculiarities of the frontier time – chaotic, dangerous, unpredictable, in which the trickster hero proves to be the most viable.