Motif of life and death in stories by Vasily Shukshin

The article reviews the motif of life and death in a number of stories by Vasily Shukshin. His characters - ordinary people, farmers, workers - think about death in the moments of collision with it, and it is then that they are introduced to the eternal meaning of life. Thanks to the motif of life and death, the stories actualize the idea of the moral strength of the people, their unity and empathy for other people’s grief. Life and death are not opposed to each other, but are forces that balance the world order. The narrator in Shukshin’s stories shows the ontological perception of death against the background of the beauty of the natural world (“Grief’), the archetypal plot of a wedding-funeral with a river crossing (“Autumn”), wise comprehension of the laws of the universe (“How the Old Man Died”, “Countrymen”). This motif reveals the position of the author, which is to assert the truth of life.