Shukshin as Ulysses. Vasily Shukshin’s image in O. Maslov’s play A Night in Barnaul [Barnaulskaya noch] (2023)

The article analyzes the portrayal of V. Shukshin in A Night in Barnaul [ Barnaulskaya noch ] (2023), a play by the Russian playwright Oleg Maslov. This dramatic work is a product of the dramaturgical lab ‘Shukshin. Myth and reality,’ a project run by V. M. Shukshin Altay Regional Drama Theatre in 2022–2024. The author points out that the heuristic potential of the traditional Shukshin biography as a genre has been exhausted. Biographers behind the latest books on Shukshin’s life and work merely compile known facts to the best of their abilities and in reliance on their own taste, and often choose to focus on selected aspects of the writer’s biography. The story of Shukshin’s life is generally well reconstructed. What holds the promise of interesting development is the genre of fictional biography fragmentarily represented by Maslov’s play A Night in Barnaul . The author examines the character of the Writer, establishing parallels with Shukshin’s actual biography and myths around his persona, and intertextual links with Shukshin’s own works, and discovers that the Writer’s ‘odyssey’ in Barnaul was explored in his later prose.