About Love and Taste for Life (Existential Utopias of Tatyana Ustinova)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the existential and philosophical aspects of the works of the writer Tatyana Ustinova. The author of the article believes that T. N. Ustinova is not only a writer, but also an existential philosopher who expresses her ideas in artistic form. The article shows a number of problems that are traditionally related to anthropological and philosophical ones and are present in many famous philosophers of both the 19th and 20th centuries, who worked both in the form of literary works and in the form of philosophical treatises. The article pays attention to the following themes characteristic of T. Ustinova’s work: love, adventure and fate, otherworldliness, and a taste for life. At the same time, the author of the article emphasizes the duality of T. Ustinova’s vision of the world: the ratio of fairy-tale-utopian plots that always lead to a positive outcome of the narrative, and an acutely realistic manner of writing built on vivid images, strong feelings, and the entire wealth of sensations that the method of presentation adopted by Ustinova evokes in the reader. All the existential aspects mentioned are interconnected. The themes are intertwined, and the general pathos of the author of the novels is considered optimistic and life-affirming. The works of T. Ustinova can act as psychotherapeutic reading and as a textbook on attitudes to life. They console and inspire, as existential philosophy should do.