Kobiece ciało przez pryzmat twórczości Aleksandra Kuprina

Abstract

Woman’s body in the works of Aleksandr Kuprin

Aleksandr Kuprin’s prose has become a part of literary and cultural-philosophical discourse at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. At that time showing sexual and corporeal nature, also the one of the woman, was the main manner to portray oneself and the times. The writer describes a wide range of representatives of the fair sex in his works. Woman’s body is seen in a multidimensional way by the writer. It enables him to answer important questions, among others on the meaning of life and death. Moreover, woman’s body, its beauty or ugliness is a point of departure for deliberations on family, woman’s place, roles and rights in society at that time, as well as for sexual and material emancipation of women, an ideal of feminine beauty along with relativity of beauty and ugliness. It also forms the basis for criticism of bourgeois culture with its double morality, which, while exposing the woman to the process of socialization, incapacitated her and made her a movable property of her father first and then her husband, furthermore depriving her of the right to express her own sexuality.