“Vodka-and-soda”: the poetics of V.M. Shukshin’s story “Version”

Statement of the problem. For many years, Shukshin’s work was considered almost exclusively in line with the traditions of realism, which was understood very simply - as a truthful depiction of reality. In modern Shukshin studies, the category of “truth” is still often put forward as fundamental for the poetics of the writer. This does not take into account the serious changes that took place in the ideological, political, and cultural life of the Soviet Union in the late sixties, as well as changes in the worldview and artistic principles of the late Shukshin. The purpose of the study is to to reveal the evolution of Shukshin’s poetics, to consider the process of transformation of the concept of “truth” in his works of the late 1960s - early 1970s. Research methodology includes historical-cultural and structural-semiotic methods. Research results. For Shukshin, as well as for many writers of the sixties, the value of Truth was absolute and immutable. However, by the end of the 1960s, the concept of “truth” in the Shukshin’s texts was problematized. By the beginning of 1970s, Shukshin had created a number of works where the idea of the fundamental impossibility of establishing objective truth was stated. The story “Version” (1973) is among them.