THE LIFE COMMUNITY IN “VILLAGE PROSE”

Abstract

The article is dedicated to conceptualizing the phenomenon of the “life community” in Russian village prose of the second half of the twentieth century as an artistic model of environmental ethics. The objective of the study is to identify, on the basis of contemporary humanitarian ecophilosophy, including the ideas of D.S. Likhachev, E.K. Neronskaya, S. L. Frank, as well as Qiao Qingju’s Confucian concept of the ecological community, the ways of representing the symbiotic existence of humans, animals, plants, and elements of “inanimate” nature in the works of V.P. Astafyev, V.G. Rasputin, V.I. Belov, and V.M. Shukshin. The material of the study includes novellas and short stories that constitute the corpus of Soviet village prose of the 1950s–1980s, as well as critical and philosophical texts forming the interdisciplinary context. Methodologically, the work relies on discourse analysis, narratological and comparative approaches, and the concepts of ecological niche, biophilia, and intersubjectivity. It is shown that village prose constructs an image of an organic world in which the human being is conceived as the center, but not the master, of existence, while living creatures and natural forces are endowed with subjectivity and ethical status. The analysis of episodes related to the personified gaze of animals, care for domestic and wild creatures, cruel treatment of them and its critique, makes it possible to identify a stable model of a biophilic attitude toward the world, based on the recognition of the ontological equality of life forms. Special attention is paid to the motifs of rupture between humans and nature under conditions of modernization, the loss of the village way of life, the destruction of kinship ties, and the spiritual crisis of the individual, which are artistically interpreted through mythopoetic images of the island, the guardian tree, water, and companion animals. It is concluded that village prose forms an idea of the life community as an ethically charged whole, in which human ecocultural responsibility serves as a condition for preserving nature, social solidarity, and the integrity of the self, and the texts themselves may be regarded as a resource for shaping contemporary ecological consciousness and intercultural dialogue.