Journal archive

Abstract: The article gives an example of gender analysis of T. Tolstaya’s story «Sleep well, my son» (2001). The author follows the ideas of E. Showalter, H. Cixous, I. Zherebkina and other researchers and understands the gender analysis as an approach to the text, which is focused on the detection of specific problems associated with the formation of patterns of gender identities as well as gender identity characters. The article explores the representation of new models of maternity in modern women's fiction of 1990, in particular, in the story by T. Tolstaya. In «Sleep well, my son» the main image object is the painful process of self-understanding by protagonist, the search of identity through the missing of mother's position. Reduced mother's position becomes a disaster and the reason for the formation of the future «defective» identity of the hero. The man in the author’s art system is represented as a «defective subject» (the definition by Irina Zherebkina). The paper analyzes the model of mother-child relationship as a projection of relations between men and women. The analysis found that the ontological problematic was realized through the representation of the models of gender relations.