Trickster Animals in V. Rasputin’s Artistic World

This article explores the portrayal of trickster animals as Others, examining how they create distinct spatial and temporal dimensions. In this interpretation, the animal is the limit of man and their double, a trickster. In contemporary literature, animal figures have become a point of reference for the space of “humanity as such”, defining its boundaries. In the article, particular attention is paid to the prose of V. Rasputin, whose world is marked by the deep closeness of man and animal, which generally distinguishes the peasant civilization depicted by the author. The universe and the personality are facing each other, the surrounding world is filled with sounds, flashes of light, and calls of the dead to the living. In the writer’s texts, the unity of all living things is disrupted only by catastrophic events. Trickster animals as messengers take part in the dialogue of worlds, corresponding to special “graceful” moments and heterotopic spaces (M. Foucault), such as a bridge, a boat, a window, a cemetery, a temple, an island, the World Tree… The article focuses on the figures of the Master of the Island of Matyora, the fairy tale crow from the story What Should I Tell the Crow?, the sacrificial sheep from the Christmas text Neighbourly, the mythological domovoy, and the mermaid with whom the heroine of the story Izba is associated. The images of the trickster animals are accompanied by motifs of werewolfism, chosenness, clairvoyance, flight, calling, and elements of shamanic practices. They appear in exceptional moments of existence (destruction of the earth, expectation of death) and accompany the hero on the threshold of insight. In Rasputin’s classical texts, where patriarchal culture is alive, the existence of messengers and guides to alien spaces is objectified. With the destruction of rituals, modernity is ostracised and alienated, man is lost here and needs new examples and rituals to reconcile him with the dramatic present. The writer’s word acquires an intimate quality, ironically associated with miraculous helpers such as the clairvoyant crow or the domovoy. The appeal in the texts of the 1980s and 1990s to the figures of elusive personalities and to fairy tales that have preserved a prerational level as the Other Mind, and their coexistence in a single cultural field actualise unexpected meanings of the very notion of modernity, which discovers the archaic in itself, and this discovery expands its idea of itself and places it in unexpected contexts.