V. Shukshin in dialogue with the 21st century: modern theater receptions

Statement of the problem. Theatrical reception is one of the possible ways to actualize classical art, to return it to the modern space of culture. The name of Vasily Shukshin is not new for the Russian theater. The interest of directors in the writer's work arose in the last year of his life. The last fifteen years have been a time of multi-genre productions based on Shukshin's prose both in Moscow and provincial theaters. The purpose of the article is to examine modern theatrical productions based on the prose of Vasily Shukshin. Research methods. A comparative method and intermedial approach are used in the paper. Research results. The theatrical and artistic potential of V. Shukshin's works is so great that it arouses theaters' keen interest not only in the content, plots, and vivid characters, as it was in the first decades after his death, but also today it is an invitation to creativity. The productions of the last fifteen years convince of the plasticity and multidimensionality of V. Shukshin's artistic word, which allows various kinds of experiments. His prose turned out to be theater-genic, it is inscribed in the most relevant directing searches and becomes an excellent material for stage artistic utterance. The writer's dialogue with the 21st century is tense: Shukshin's prose and its stage embodiment are perceived as an allegory of the moral state of the Russian world and the world in general. Shukshin's heroes continue the dialogue, already without the author, already in the new country, in the 21st century, but about what the writer did not finish telling his contemporaries in the 1970s.