Publicistics of Vasiliy Shukshin in an aestetic context of the "village" prose

The author proceeds from the typological necessity to clarify the status of V. Shukshin in the literary process of the second half of the twentieth century. The solution to this problem is associated not only with the analysis of artistic, but also publicistic heritage of the writer, which is an integral utterance about people and their being and is necessary for a holistic understanding of his aesthetics. Depending on the way of the narrative action two plans in V. Shukshin’s publicistics can be distinguished: actual publicistic, in which the rhetorical purpose dominated, and essayistic, with is characterized by the mode of reflection. During the analysis, firstly, the author reconstructs the writer’s representations about the way of life of traditional Russian village and about the determinants of its crisis, which are expressed rhetorically. Secondly, an attempt is made to interpret the subjective experiences that become the subject of author’s reflection as an essayistic utterance. The analysis confirmed the proximity of creative work by V. Shukshin`s to art searches of the «village prose», and essential divergence from it. On the one hand, the writer as well generates his retrospective utopia of the peasant world. On the other hand, he overcomes utopianism of a consciousness inherent to the «villagers», he appears as the carrier of consciousness, fallen away from clan, he is in the painful search of values no longer collective, but an individual existence.