The ‘lyricists’ strike back. The humanitarian and natural science worldviews in V. Shukshin’s short stories The Sunday Blues [Voskresnaya toska] and The Dogged One [Uporny]

The article discusses two stories by V. Shukshin, An Invitation for Two / The Sunday Blues [Priglashenie na dva litsa / Voskresnaya toska] (1962) and The Dogged One [Uporny] (1973), in their contemporary context of the polemic between the ‘physicists’ and the ‘lyricists’ [lyric poets]. The earlier story exists in two versions: while the conflict resolves itself in the first draft, the 1973 story clearly shows that the ‘physicists’ and the ‘lyricists’ can never reconcile. Monya Kvasov, a naïve and excentric inventor of a perpetual motion machine, triumphs over the pragmatic but narrow-minded ‘physicists.’ The conflict appears to have intensified in Shukshin’s later works: philologist Stepanov, a character from the film script of Happy Go Lucky [Pechki-lavochki], bemoans the proliferation of the “almighty fizmat [a department of, or a qualification in, physics and mathematics].” Shukshin felt he lived in a “mechanized era,” when “remembering your soul” becomes especially important.

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