Constructive function of love narrative in Natalia Reznikova’s short stories

Abstract

Natalia Reznikova, a writer of Russian emigration in China, combined in her stories the tradition of love short stories with a moral view of the earlier forms of passion expression. In her prose, judgment is imparted to a woman who cares less about spiritualizing passion than about narrative coherence, which forbids the overt display of affection. The events must progress as in a fine novel, not a short story. Criticizing the symbolist premature equations between the corporeal and spiritual worlds, Reznikova is close to philosophical idealism in the spirit of Vladimir Soloviev, where a love story should be a life drama, not an episode. But she readily uses the cliches of cinema and mass literature, while morally rejecting their content. Such cliches contribute not to the movement of the plot, but to the cyclization of stories depicting the different ages of a woman, when the similarity of plot patterns frames a lifelong love. In Reznikova’s poetics, the feminine optic regulates the implicit art of love, and the corporeality of woman is manifested in her capacity for life-long readiness to act and self-control.