The Decline Of Paternity

Lyudmila Ulitskaya is the first female writer who received the Russian Booker Prize. Presently, the study on Ulitskaya in China mainly concentrates on the "female" characters in her works, with detailed analysis and researches done in this field. However, the various male characters are neglected. Therefore, it is useful to study the male images in Ulitskaya's works from the perspective of feminism and patriarchy. The significance of the study is to reach a conclusion on the types of the above male images and the decline of these images, and to help the reader understand Ulitskaya's works better.This thesis selects the male images in three of Ulitskaya's novels, Medea and Her Children,The Case of Kukotskiy and Sincerely yours, Shurik to discuss the character and disposition of the male images and the decline of their images in her works through the perspective of the declination of patriarchy. In the analysis, the theory of feminism and the methods of comparison and text analysis are adopted.This thesis consists of five parts, including introduction, three chapters and conclusion.The introduction first gives an overview of the background of Ulitskaya's writing. Then the literature review of the study on Ulitskaya in China demonstrates that present study mainly confines to the female perspective and that the study on the male images is still a vacancy. Therefore, it is significant to study these male characters in her novels.The first chapter analyses the hero in the three novels of Ulitskaya. Through text analysis, the thesis summarizes the general character of Samuil,Kukotskiy and Shurik to conclude the similarities and differences of the male characters of different times, regions and status.The second chapter mainly discusses the influences of the female writing in Ulitskaya's works on the above mentioned male images' characters and the representation of these influences. On the basis of this discussion, the thesis further studies the deeper spiritual connotation behind the traditional male images such as Samuil and Kukotskiy and the new male images such as Shurik.The third chapter studies the declination of the male images in Ulitskaya's novels under the social background of patriarchy of traditional Russia to discuss the reason for this declination:the flourishing of feminism and the inevitable decline of patriarchy that follows.The conclusion gives a review of the three male characters and summarizes that the decline of the male images in Ulitskaya's novels follows a clear line:from the complete traditional male images such as Samuil who betrays female and totally neglects female, to the transiting male images such as Kukotskiy who begins to pay attention to female but does not really respect them, and finally to the new male images such as Shurik who respects and protects female wholeheartedly and whose character become somewhat "neutralized" or even "feminized". This decline just witnesses the decay of patriarchy in contemporary Russia.