Four suicides: Vasily Shukshin’s suicidological discourse

Suicidology occupies a separate niche in modern thanatological research. The problematic of death is a programmatic component of Vasily Shukshin’s artistic picture of the world. Several reasons underlie the study of Shukshin’s thanatological and, in particular, suicidological discourse. Firstly, the study aims to expand the field of literary thanatology through the application of the thanatopoietics apparatus in the methodology of Shukshin studies. Secondly, the historical period of the writer’s work and the chronological context of his contemporary heroes is the twentieth century – an era burdened with an inferiority complex, the century of suicides. So Shukshin’s semiotic fixation on the mortal problems proves the legitimacy of turning to his legacy to analyze the phenomenon of suicide from the point of view of the multiplicity of meanings, typology and classification, methods of artistic realization, philosophical and aesthetic significance. Thirdly, the concept of suicide against the background of the poetics of death marks certain stages in the evolution of Shukshin’s creativity. The appeal to the topic of death and suicide at the level of metatextual and intertextual manifestations, motif plan, characterological accents is observed throughout Shukshin’s creative career: “Grinka Malyugin” (1962), “I Want to to Live” (1966), “Grief” (1966), “Withers, disappears” (1966), “Quirky” (1967), “In Profile and Full-face” (1967), “How the Old man was Dying” (1967), “Countrymen” (1968), “I Believe!” (1970), “The Strong Go on” (1970), “My Son-in-law Stole a Car of Firewood” (1971), “Gena Proydisvet” (1972), “Alyosha Beskonvojnyj” (1972), and “Redhead” (1974). However, the suicidological program itself is most consistently presented in four stories from different years, in which the theme of suicide becomes the main one: “An Accidental Shot” (1966), “The Bastard” (1970), “The Wife saw her Husband of to Paris” (1971), and “Pedestal” (1972). As a result of the analysis of these stories, the changes in the moral and aesthetic position of Shukshin are revealed: from rejection of suicide to its ethical justification, and then deconstruction of death – denial of denial. Thus, Shukshin’s suicidological discourse, on the one hand, is woven into the canvas of philosophical reflection on the theme of the art of death and death in art; on the other hand, it demonstrates a certain specificity of the ideological and figurative space of artistic thanatology in the context of the “poetry” of dying, cemetery rhetoric, existential alienation, artistic “gift of death”, symbolic rejection of life in finding oneself.