Sleep of Reason: Existential Motifs in Vasily Shukshin’s Story “Thoughts”

Abstract

Shukshin’s characters tend to reflect on problems that cannot be called otherwise than philosophical. For example, in the film There Is Such a Lad, the characters indulge in arguments about death, love, and the meaning of life more than once. So, already in Shukshin’s early works, two poles - love and death - that determine the themes of his characters’ philosophical reflections were identified. Despite the abundance of thanatological motifs and symbols in the film, the director rejects the philosophy of pessimism. The final phrase of the film is permeated with a life-affirming pathos: “So, we will live!” Later, Shukshin became less optimistic. The feeling of the total loss of meaning, characteristic of the heroes of Shukshin’s stories of the late 1960s -early 1970s, turned out to be akin to an existentialist experience of the absurdity of being. Night memories and reflections of Matvey Ryazantsev, the protagonist of the story “Thoughts”, provoke the accordion of the enamored Kolka Malashkin. The completely non-melodic sounds of Kolka’s accordion are functionally akin to the alarming hum of the alarm bell with the invariably accompanying screams. Kolka Malashkin not only violates public order, he also breaks the unconsciously automatic order of existence of his fellow villagers. The radical change in the outlook of Matvey Ryazantsev, who has followed social rituals all his life, begins with surprise, with the discovery of the strange in the usual. Matvey Ryazantsev’s nocturnal thoughts about love and death are close to the philosophy of Nietzsche and Camus, and also organically correlate with the concept of Shklovsky. The most important semantic core of the story “Thoughts” is the motif of haymaking. Three scenes of haymaking simulate three types of attitude to life. It is senseless to hope to continue to exist in the memory of descendants. Human life is like a fleeting footprint on the grass. A purely utilitarian approach to absolutely everything is absurd. Matvey Ryazantsev appears in the story as a modern Sisyphus with his meaningless work. And only the “wild delight” of the memorable night, when the thirteen-year-old Motka reaches the Nietzschean “Dionysian ideal”, is able to justify the absurdity and tragedy of human existence. Without waiting for Kolka’s accordion on one of the nights, Matvey falls into despondency, returns to a boring routine. If in the film There Is Such a Lad death is reincarnated into love, in the story “Thoughts” everything is the other way around, love turns into death. For Kolka, marriage, in his own words, is not the beginning of a new life, but a stop, the end of the road. The final “terrifying silence” is the silence of death. The author declares no conflicts of interests.