https://doi.org/10.31261/pr.17593
Transgressive elements in the prose of Lyudmila Ulitskaya based on the short stories Подружки, Алиса покупает смерть and Иностранка from the cycle Тело души.
The concept of spirit and body, assuming the sacredness of the latter also in its erotic and physiological aspects, shatters hitherto ideas about the dualistic nature of the human ‘self’. According to Ulitskaya, the ideal being, which concretises itself in the body, confers upon the latter the status of what is necessary and constant in the eternal circle of life and death, making it the element of love and goodness. Hence, corporeality, earthliness and mortality constitute an existential unity in the ‘dance of existence’ of the heroines predestined for it. These, as we will try to show, are the ‘bodies of the spirit’, living and dead, whose corporeal, transgressive ‘spirituality’ will constitute the essential object and purpose of the analysis in this study, with the account taken of the strategies of femininity and typical elements of poetics peculiar to the Russian postmodernist.
As the attempt will be made to prove, the nature of the ‘sacredness’ of a woman in the texts of the author of Медеи и ее детей paradoxically unites in itself the sacred and the profane. The higher means the things which arouse terror, recognition and adoration. This also means the prohibition implying transgressive erotic raptures, incessant licentious dance of life and death, hiding at the bottom all the anxiety and fear that were born from the awareness of one’s own mortality = discontinuity. In light of the above, the lust to overpower it, enveloped in the violation of all the laws, in the overcoming of shame, in the externalisation of weakness, illness, imperfection, animalisation, sexuality and physiologism, can be found in abundance on the pages of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s short stories.
Keywords: transgression, the sacred, the profane, eroticism, death.
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No. 4 (188) (2024)
Published: 2024-12-19
10.31261/pr
Język Polski
Русский
English