The City as a Theme and Text in the Prose of Victoria Tokareva

Selemeneva Marina Valer'evna ORCID: 0000-0003-0083-9802 Doctor of Philology Professor, Department of Social and Humanitarian Disciplines and History of Law, Yury Luzhkov' Moscow Metropolitan Governance University 107045, Russia, Moscow, Sretenka str., 28 marselem78@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Victoria Tokareva has always occupied a special place among the authors of urban prose: her stories and novellas were perceived by critics and the readership as "feminine", aimed at creating images of contemporaries and understanding the purpose of women, while the urban context was more often interpreted as a background, rather than as a significant component of the artistic concept of prose. In the research corpus of texts devoted to the work of V.S. Tokareva, attention is mainly focused on the problems of individual author's style and ways of its representation (N.A. Bozhko, N.M. Kalashnikova, Yu.N. Kireeva), on the gender aspects of prose (N.P. Medentseva, F.R. Murtazaeva, Z.Z. Pardaeva, N.N. Tertychnaya, O.M. Kholomeenko), on the intertextuality of stories (Yu.M. Afanasyeva, N.V. Zubakova, L.V. Dorofeeva, S.A. Kirsanycheva), on the spiritual and moral foundations of works (E.V. Kondrasheva, L.A. Sarkisyan). In our opinion, since 1964, when Tokareva's first story "A Day without Lies" was published, an important component of the writer's artistic world has been the image of the city both in ideological and thematic, and in textual dimensions proper.

The exact recreation of urban everyday life, attention to the details of life and lifestyle of a big city resident, understanding the specifics of the moral and philosophical paradigm of the average citizen bring V.S. Tokareva's prose closer to the work of Yu.V. Trifonov, Yu.M. Nagibin, V.S. Makanin, but with the generality of campaigns, the city as a theme and text is highlighted by Tokareva with special semantic and stylistic shades and it should be studied both from the point of view of the poetics of local texts, and from the point of view of ideological and thematic significance.

The artistic concept of the city in Tokareva's prose is based on two approaches. The first approach assumes the image of the habitat as a conditional City – generalized, devoid of recognizable topographical signs, looking like a microcosm on the scale of the planet, then a macro-space in which a house and a person are lost: "A star is hanging far away, and the Earth is hanging under it, and on the Ground is the former mansion of an impoverished nobleman. And on the second floor, three meters above the people, stands Natasha" ("How the fog fell") ^{[12, p. 52]}. The city in the context of this approach is recreated sketchily, the writer's optics are focused only on significant urban loci reflecting the thoughts and actions of the heroes: "The street rises gently upwards, and it seems to me that on my street, just at this place where I step, the globe is rounded. He slowly flies in the universe and turns a little around his axis, while I walk on the earth, as on a globe, and find myself upside down, then upside down" ("Next holidays") ^{[12, pp. 286-287]}. Even if the city depicted in such an artistic perspective is named or guessed by one or two details, this does not change the content orientation: for the author, the habitat that forms and determines the qualities and actions of the characters is important.

"The city is first of all people" ("Swimming Instructor") ^{[12, p. 209]}, – such an attitude to the image of the environment through its inhabitants brings the gallery of characters to the forefront of research attention and increases the importance of the typological aspect of the system of images of small prose.

The hero of Victoria Tokareva is a modern "little man" living in a big city and immersed in everyday worries. Romantic dreams and petty actions, love of freedom and formalism, wisdom and infantilism get along in it. Tokareva shows that modern citizens, entangled in everyday and moral issues, deserve leniency and sympathy.

Tokareva's character is often an episodic character, and not from the point of view of a theoretical and literary approach and a place in the system of images, but from the position of manifestation, the significance of the character in the context of the general flow of life. Dr. Smolensky is acutely aware of his "temporality and episodicity" ("Damn it to hell") ^{[12, p. 329]}. This feeling is conveyed through a spatial dichotomy: trying to preserve both the family hearth and the new locus of love, the hero loses integrity and his own place in life: "At home he thought about Nadia, and with Nadia he thought about home, and it turned out that he had no love, no family, no regime, but only one tortured conscience" ^{[12, p. 318]}. The final spatial image of the hero is a clinic, which indicates hanging in an intermediate, non–final state without making a decision, and the only non-episodic in his life are patients and work.

In the story "Where nothing is allowed", the theme of episodicity extends to the whole life of the hero: "... my life is a continuous episode, I myself am an episodic character" ^{[12, p. 115]}. A character is an episodic hero not from the point of view of presence in the text, but from the point of view of presence in the life of other characters. Episodicity becomes synonymous with insignificance. As events unfold, the character reveals himself in relationships with friends, acquaintances, women, and his general insignificance is enhanced by the motive of a good character: "I have a good character, I don't demand anything from anyone, and it's easy with me. I don't demand anything, because I don't invest myself in anyone or anything" ^{[12, p. 115]}. Tokareva gives a reference to the text of the Gospel of Matthew: "Where nothing is allowed, there is nothing to take" ^{[12, p. 115]}. We agree with Yu.M. Afanasyeva that "quotations from the Bible allow us to look at the events described in the literary text from the perspective of timeless parables and testaments in their content, make us compare the storylines and characters of the characters with the ideal of human behavior" ^{[1, p. 38]}. The moral commentary with the help of the gospel quotation consists in highlighting the lack of character, the lack of fullness of the characters with meanings, the unwillingness to take responsibility for their choice. Tokareva's hero glides through life without leaving a trace and without giving himself up to anything, even creativity, which is formally his sphere of self-realization. For the central character and his entourage, creativity has remained a student's dream, or has become a craft, a routine for earning money, "nothing is allowed" in them, and they have nothing to share with their students. Fragments of the narrative associated with the Gnessin Institute do not add up to a single story of creative self-realization.

The city is also episodically, fragmentally presented in the story: Moscow is recognizable by such loci as the Mayakovsky monument, Tchaikovsky Hall, metro stations. The city is shown as a place of casual meetings, fleeting hobbies, meaningless connections. The hero of the story accidentally meets a girl named Gelana and is afraid not to recognize her on a date, since he only remembered her hat: "If Gelana comes in a different hat, I just won't recognize her" ^{[12, p. 100]}. The meeting place of the heroes is someone else's apartment, a random companion also has the status of a life episode, which will be remembered only due to the unusual name of the girl. Emotionally and valuably, "nothing is put into the hero," he declares that he is not ready for a serious relationship and understands that "women really did not count on me, but treated me lightly, as an episode" ^{[12, p. 114]}.

The poetics of the episode, fragment determines Tokareva's way of creating an image of an ordinary person, a hero, whose typicality is stated both in direct speech and in author's assessments.

Engineer Nikolai ("Next holidays") considers himself a metropolitan philistine: "I am an ordinary, sober, untalented person. This is probably my tragedy" ^{[12, p. 278]}. His wife Alla is a teacher of Russian language and literature. The life of this family is monotonous and predictable, boring weekdays brighten up only holidays. The heroes have no permanent friends and constant company, so their holidays are hectic, noisy and meaningless. The expectation of the holiday turns out to be more significant and emotionally intense than its holding. An indicator of the mediocrity of the heroes is the "lack of distance in the eyes" ("... I'm not the most important, I'm an ordinary engineer, without distance in the eyes" ^{[12, p. 278]}). The distance in the eyes is measured by urban space and compared with the macrocosmic (ideal) scale: "An astronaut has the distance from the Earth to the Moon. And for me and Wili – from the Taganskaya metro station to the Mayakovskaya metro station ^{[12, p. 278]}. The short route of the Moscow metro is synonymous with the modest scale of the personal claims of the central character of the story. Having compared himself and the cosmonaut (an ordinary/ outstanding life path), Nikolai is strengthened in the thought of his own ordinariness. But at the same time, he keenly feels the imperfection of human existence and the harmony of the universe. In an ordinary person, a huge personal potential is revealed – the ability to dream, to feel involvement in world-scale events, to be true to his word.

At first glance, it may seem that in the finale of the story, the hero humbly perceives his fate and the fate of his wife: "Alka will teach literature – after all, children should know Pushkin. And I will invent mechanisms – there should be an automatic line at the factory" ^{[12, p. 287]}. The everyday lives of the heroes are colored by the dream of the following holidays. In Tokareva's urban prose, images of nature often play the role of a spatial antithesis to the urban lifestyle, respectively, in the finale of the story, "spring forest, smoky lilac and transparent" appears as a symbol not only of the following holidays (time for oneself), but of overcoming oneself ordinary and finding oneself present.

In Tokareva's urban prose, the theme of loneliness of an ordinary person "without distance in the eyes" is realized both in existential and in everyday aspects. In the story "Sixty rubles is not money", this topic is revealed through the story of the accidental purchase of an invisible hat. The genre range of small and medium prose allows Tokareva to concisely and succinctly convey the parity of the city and the person through the detail. The invisible hat is a marker of loneliness: no one notices the hero even without an invisible hat, the hat brings this situation to a literal embodiment: "... I didn't know myself whether I lived here or not. I eat, sleep, play with my daughter, talk with my wife. <...> But, in fact, I am not here" ^{[12, p. 163]}. The cap is perceived either in the simplest objective meaning in terms of its cost, material, availability in the nearest stall, or as a detail symbolically indicating the presence / absence of one person in the space of the city and in the life of another.

N.V. Zubakova notes that "a favorite technique used by V. Tokareva in his works, is a precedent comparison" ^{[4, p. 93]}. In the story "Sixty Rubles is not Money", Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" becomes a source of precedent comparisons: the invisible hero in a wigon cap compares himself to Pontius Pilate's dog named Banga: "It was an ordinary dog - the same as its other breeds. But because she served Pontius Pilate, she seemed to herself an extraordinary, privileged dog. I also felt like a privileged dog and was ready to lie at Viki's feet both in this life and beyond the grave. But she didn't need it" ^{[12, p. 159]}. With the help of this precedent comparison, the topic of reflected significance is actualized, when a character is valuable not by itself, but due to belonging to another. In addition, this precedent situation is perceived as a reference to the Bulgakov motif of a shared fate ("... the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves" ^{[2, p. 508]}). The heroes of Tokareva's story broke this rule and turned into invisibles. The proximity of city streets inhabited by the heroes of the story only enhances the feeling of loneliness and the absurdity of not meeting: "It takes some kind of miracle, an invisible hat, for two people living at the same time, in the same city, on neighboring streets, twenty minutes away" ^{[12, p.163]} to meet. In order to become "visible" again, i.e. meaningful, included in life, performing meaningful actions, they need to go back to the past and "share the fate" of each other.

The hero's path from the house on Chistye Prudy can be traced on the map of the city: "past the cinema "Colosseum", the publishing house "Art" - along the Boulevard Ring. And while I was walking, I didn't meet a single living person" ^{[12, p. 166]}. An empty city filled with people in invisible hats is a visualization of the motif of loneliness in a crowd: "People put on hats and are now invisible. Maybe there are a lot of people on the street – I just don't see anyone" ^{[12, p. 166]}. In fact, the hero walks a short distance, but meaningfully he rewinds his life four years ago. By throwing away the invisible hat, he is freed from the status of an insignificant, unimportant person: "... I know everything about myself: I am a talented designer, and seeing me every day is happiness" ^{[12, p. 165]}.

The theme of loneliness, realized with the help of the invisibility motif, is especially acute in Tokareva's stories about women's destinies. The heroine of the story "Swimming Instructor" Tanya in her own way repeats the idea of the hero-narrator from the story "Sixty rubles is not money": "... when you walk and no one notices you, there is a feeling that you are optional" ^{[12, p. 207]}. Optional (meaning "unnecessary") is a key characteristic of many heroines of urban prose: their abilities and talent are not in demand in society, they are lonely or connected with an unloved person (typological features of female characters are considered in detail in the works of N.P. Medentseva ^[5], F.R. Murtazayeva ^[6]).

Tokareva's heroines have a strong-willed character, but their self-esteem is often underestimated. They are ready to support even a weak, unsuccessful and characterless man, forgive him selfishness and lies, are ready to tell a random interlocutor "about their love, which is over, and now that it is over, it seems that it never happened" ^{[12, p. 68]}. Residents of the city, immersed in everyday worries, find an outlet in love or creativity. They remain sincere and treat everyday troubles with irony. Throughout her career, Tokareva creates images of women who retain their femininity, tenderness, and the ability to sacrifice themselves in the rhythm of life in a big city.

The theme of loneliness in a big city is filled with existential meaning in V.S. Tokareva and is often significantly scaled: "Marina suddenly thought that the Earth with people is also an anthill. And she carries an unbearable burden among all. And someone is sitting on a log from above and watching..." ^[11]. Loneliness in a large anthill city is expanded to the scale of the Anthill Earth and is associated with the biblical motif of human loneliness in the face of God. Researchers L.V. Dorofeeva and S.A. Kirsanycheva fairly correlate the above passage with a verbal icon, which is perceived as "a successful attempt to portray an invisible God as if with invisible colors of subtext" ^{[3, p. 11]}. The city in the Universe, shown through the characters and lifestyle of its inhabitants, is the ideological and thematic dominant of small and medium prose by V.S. Tokareva.

The second approach to recreating the image of the city can be considered in the context of the poetics of local texts. The story "There will be another summer" refers to the key motifs and images of the "Petersburg" and "Moscow" texts of Russian literature [see: 9]. The spatial antithesis of Leningrad/Tokareva correlates Moscow with the juxtaposition of a place of strength and a place of weakness.  "Everyone living on earth has a place where he is most comfortable. My place is Leningrad" ^{[12, p. 126]}. Tokareva's image of Leningrad is semantically colored by such meanings as love of home, first love, first childhood friendship. Even Tokareva's traditional tourist set of spatial images of the northern capital is shown through the prism of the heroine's personal perception: "I love the Bronze Horseman and the Summer Grid, where tourists are brought. I love the shabby Vyborg side. I like to just wander the streets, I recognize them and I don't recognize them. This makes me sad and I want to live better, brighter than I live now" ^{[12, p. 127]}. The favorite place in Moscow for the heroine of the story is the Leningrad railway station, perceived as the reception of her hometown in a foreign capital. L.A. Sargsyan, considering the structure and poetics of the embodiment of conflicts in V.S. Tokareva's prose, noted that "conflict is not a cause, but only a consequence of internal and external discomfort" ^{[8, p. 145]}. The heroine's conflict with Moscow is not caused by the properties of the city itself, but by the fact that it has become a space in which the heroine has not found herself.

Each spatial image in Tokareva's prose is endowed with the meaning that relationships or memories associated with this space carry. Moscow in the story "There will be another summer" is shown as a place of failures, weakness, loneliness. Tokareva's key characteristic of the capital is alien. Describing the Taganka workshop, Tokareva emphasizes that the owner of the house, his feelings, and the walls of the dwelling themselves do not belong to the heroine: "The house is not mine. He is not mine" ^{[12, p. 134]}. The author not only builds the antithesis of his native home on Vasilievsky Island and someone else's workshop on Taganka, but also projects a change of seasons on this spatial contrast: hopeful summer was replaced by hopeless autumn.

From autumn Moscow, from unrequited love, the heroine of the story goes to Leningrad for a wedding and carries smoky glasses as a gift. This artistic detail holds together several semantic knots of the story: smoky glasses as a way to ignore the realities of life, as a link between the destinies of the characters and a reason to see each other before parting, as an inappropriate wedding gift: "Now, however, autumn, glasses are not needed. But there will be another summer" ^{[12, p. 137]}. Another summer in the meaning of "another happy life" is associated with Tokareva with the heroine's trip to Leningrad. In the finale of the story, the heroine goes to her city for someone else's wedding in order to be in her locus, be filled with strength and, as the open finale shows, return to Moscow.

The image of Moscow in Tokareva's prose is often accompanied by motives of alienation and dislike. "They don't like me in Moscow" ^{[9, p. 210]}, – the hero of the story "Swimming Instructor" declares. Lilya, the heroine of the story "So what?", after moving to Moscow, "felt lost in a big city, like a button in a box. Who needs it? When will they get it and sew it somewhere?" ^{[10, p. 11]}. Remote areas of Moscow are perceived by the heroes as a provincial environment: "What is the point of living in Moscow if you live in Brateevo? You might as well live in Tambov or Tula" ^{[11, p. 56]}. In addition, Tokareva often sneers at cliches about the capital: "An engineer for one hundred and twenty rubles. An engineer is bad. A Muscovite is good. Still the capital." ^{[10, p. 9]}. In general, one may get the impression that the image of Moscow was created at the expense of negative techniques and accumulates mainly negatively colored semantics. It should be clarified that Tokareva's Moscow text is also filled with spatial images that emphasize the antiquity and tradition of the capital. The conventional line of confrontation between new Moscow and ancient Moscow can be shown using two loci: a block house with good audibility, where everyone is visible and loneliness is painfully experienced / an old mansion in which an impoverished nobleman lived ("The rooms were cramped, the stairs were oblique" ^{[12, p. 47]}). Note that all spatial images contain the semantics of ignorance and disorder, which makes the opposition imaginary: both the block house and the old mansion are variations of the "overturned house" by Yu.V. Trifonov, here "everyone sat together and apart" ^{[12, p. 69]}.

Tokareva's urban prose has many autobiographical features: one of them is the theme of attachment to Leningrad and a long rejection/habituation/acceptance of Moscow. A vivid example of understanding the key metropolitan loci – monuments to Pushkin and Mayakovsky is the plot of the autobiographical story "So what?". The main storyline of the story is the love story of the screenwriter Lily to the director, whom she calls Gandhi. The reason for one of the failed dates of the heroes is that it is scheduled "near the monument to the famous poet" ^{[10, p. 34]}. Lilya is waiting on Pushkin Square, Gandhi is waiting near the monument to Mayakovsky. The heroine goes to Pushkin (Passion Square), as she is looking for a way to give her passions the form of harmony, harmony, mutual responsibility; Gandhi sees in Lila only a source of inspiration and pleasure, he is destructive and disharmonious. The route between two monuments (two destinies of heroes) it was never laid, each character remained in his locus with his values.

In one of the last interviews, V.S. Tokareva, describing her feelings from the center of Moscow, compared the city crowd with a source of energy: "Everyone goes about their business, and it's as if you get into some kind of energy flow. You go along with everyone, it seems that you have some kind of common goal with others. This is what only the center gives. I felt like I was living in the capital of a big country."^[13] The writer accurately noted that the city, energetically strong and filled, is testing its hero. If there is no parity between a person and a city, then a conflict is formed, both spatial and semantic.

The study of the poetics of the embodiment of the city in V.S. Tokareva's prose gives grounds to conclude about the importance of the city as the main spatial image and as an artistic means that allows building a parallelism of the character's state and his environment. For several decades, V.S. Tokareva has been faithful to the chosen theme of urban life and continues to publish collections of short stories and novellas "When it got a little warmer" (1972), "Flying Swing" (1978), "Nothing Special" (1983), "To say — not to say..." (1991), "Male fidelity" (2002), "The House behind the village" (2018). Her late prose retains an ironic intonation, subtle psychologism, instructiveness without edification and deep metaphor. Reading Tokareva's small and medium prose through the prism of the poetics of local texts makes it possible to clarify the originality of the author's interpretation of the images of the two capitals, and shifting the research focus to the generalized image of the City is productive from the point of view of clarifying the typological features of the character sphere and identifying relevant moral and philosophical issues.