Journal archive

Abstract: The paper explores transformations of the road motif as well as the road movie's conventions in Svetlana Proskurina's «Peremirie» («The Truce»). The article analyzes central characters and their actions through the prism of fairy-tale motifs as described by V. Propp in his «Morphology of the Folktale» and «Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale». Journey through the Russian province by the protagonist, the truck driver Egor Matveev (Ivan Dobronravov), allows the film director to create a convincing image of Russia as the fairy-tale space, with men as its primary inhabitants. The film recreates a chronotope of the homosocial «men’s house», where teenagers undergo different tests associated with the rite of passage. However, Proskurina’s film subverts this motif. After undergoing various ordeals, including the temporary death, protagonists do not mature against expectations. Such and similar transformations of the fairy-tale motifs in the representation of the protagonist’s journey across the provincial Russia in Proskurina's film, serves to a problematization of the new social and cultural order that has emerged in the 2000s.