«WOMAN – BODY – FOOD»: THE «ANTI-TRINITY» IN V. SOROKIN’S SHORT STORY «NASTYA»

Abstract

The article offers a reading of Vladimir Sorokin’s short story «Nastya» from the collection Pir (2000) as a systematic profanation of the Orthodox Trinitarian dogma and the mystery of the Eucharist. Drawing on Girard, Bakhtin, and Connell, the author introduces the concept of the «anti-trinity»: three identities – woman, body, and food – simultaneously imposed on the heroine to form a ritual of pure violence. The feast scene is analyzed as a parody of the Eucharist in which a ritual meant to connect with the sacred instead culminates in death. The resurrection proclaimed by the heroine’s name never occurs, and the image itself is reduced to excretion. Sorokin preserves all the external forms of the sacred while parodically altering their inner core, revealing that under such conditions only a false sacredness and an absent salvation can be produced. The findings contribute to the study of Sorokin’s poetics and, more broadly, to the analysis of the profanation of the sacred in postmodern literature.