The Christian principle in the image of the main heroine of V. Tokareva’s novella “The Tree on the Roof”

the research is devoted to the analysis of the Christian principle in the image of the main heroine of Victoria Tokareva’s novella “The Tree on the Roof” as a representation of spiritual realism in contemporary “women’s” prose. The relevance is determined by the growing interest in Orthodox motifs in post-Soviet literature and the need to clarify the ways of integrating religious tradition into the poetics of everyday life. The aim is to identify key Christian meanings, their functions in the development of the plot, as well as the conditions of their reception. The novelty lies in a comprehensive interpretation of the heroine through the prism of the hagiographic canon, intertextual connections, and onomastic semantics, with an emphasis on the issues of love and violence, faith and identity. The material of the study includes the text of the novella, reviews, interviews with the author, biographical information about the actress prototype, and comparative texts from Russian classical and contemporary literature. The methodology comprises narrative, motif, and imagery analysis, hermeneutics, intertextual and cultural-historical approaches, as well as an onomastic study of the transition from the name Matrena to the name Vera. The procedures involve highlighting key episodes, coding religious motifs, comparing value oppositions, and testing the stability of interpretations on independent fragments, while noting the limitations of validity. The results show that the heroine is constructed as the bearer of Orthodox virtues of patience, humility, mercy, and fidelity to the commandments, while the renaming motif marks the turn to existential faith. The episodes of the blockade ordeal and the vision of John the Theologian structure the experience of miraculous support and spiritual maturity, and the icon-like gaze functions as a sign of personal vocation. Everyday practices of serving the family, the ability to forgive, and the acceptance of suffering give the image hagiographic features and explain the ethical persuasiveness of the finale. The symbolism of the tree and the fruit articulates the tension between temptation and the commandment, while the opposition between sacrificial female love and revolutionary violence enhances the humanistic perspective of the narrative.

Victoria Tokareva, Christian motifs, spiritual realism, women’s prose, intertextual analysis