TWO MODELS OF LOVE ILLUSION IN T. TOLSTAYA’S STORY “SONYA” AND L. PETRUSHEVSKAYA’S STORY “WATERLOO BRIDGE”

Abstract

The article offers a comparative analysis of two well‑known short stories from contemporary Russian literature: Tatiana Tolstaya’s “Sonya” and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s “Waterloo Bridge.” Both works, written in the mid‑1980s, appear to address a similar situation: their protagonists – lonely, unattractive women – construct a romantic illusion that becomes their sole means of escaping a harsh, impoverished existence. However, a close reading reveals that Tolstaya and Petrushevskaya propose fundamentally different, and in many ways opposite, models of this experience. The article examines four key aspects: the type of heroine, the source of the love illusion, the function of self‑sacrifice, and finally the authorial stance. Based on this analysis, the article concludes that Tolstaya, drawing on the motif of holy foolishness (yurodstvo), creates a tragic yet, in its own way, luminous portrait of a “wise fool” whose self‑sacrificing love takes on an ontological significance, and whose heroine is treated with undisguised authorial sympathy. Petrushevskaya, by contrast, consistently applying the poetics of postmodernism and the “zero degree of writing”, gives us a type of “absurd woman” whose cinematic illusion cannot transform her and serves merely as the target of relentless authorial irony. Comparing these two strategies thus reveals the internal polemical tension within Russian postmodernism concerning the eternal themes of love and the female lot.