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Abstract:

Valeria Viktorovna Peruanskaya (1920–2011) is one of the “unnoticed” writers, but her works reveal aspects that deserve closer attention. The everyday life of ordinary Soviet women is brought to the fore. The place of action is a flat, a city, a province. But in the story “Kikimora” (1976), dedicated to the love of aging people, the topos of a dacha emerges as a place of solitude and tranquillity, opposed to the bustling city. For lovers, the dacha becomes a space that allows them to hide from judgement and ridicule. The heroine of the story, the inconspicuous but sensitive Anna Konstantinovna, whose whole life was connected with a communal apartment, perceives the cottage as a wonderful, previously unfamiliar world. This place is endowed with heavenly features — naturalness, spaciousness, the possibility of trust, a different flow of time. But it is the dacha that becomes the place where the heroine is faced with a violation of the boundaries of security outlined by her. The cruelty of real life invades the idyllic space, destroying the fragile harmony. The film version of this work is particularly interesting (the film “Last, last, the charm...” (1984) by Yaropolk Lapshin). And although the accents in the film adaptation are noticeably shifted, the contrasts outlined by the Peruvian are revealed even more clearly.