2015-№4(49) Article 11

S.N. Filushkina

Sophia Kovalevsky depicted in Alice Munro’s story “Too much happiness”. P.123-132.

UDC 821.111(71)

The article focuses on a Canadian writer Alice Munro (born 1931), winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. The paper analyzes the reasons underlying the nomination of the writer, who published about twenty various collections of short stories in 1968–2012. Alice Munro is a three-time winner of the Governor General Award, which is very prestigious in Canada. In 2009 Munro won the Man Booker International Prize.
The introductory part of the article centers on Alice Munro’s work, it highlights similarities and differences between Alice Munro’s style and Chekhov’s one. It underlines Alice Munro’s popularity in Russia, which is manifested through the publication of interesting works devoted to Munro and through the organization of research conferences devoted to the writer. The main part of the article focuses on the analysis of Munro’s story dedicated to a famous Russian woman, an outstanding mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky. To analyze Munro’s story, the author of the article uses historical and literary approach, culturological and biographical methods of research, the auteur theory and the modes of discourse analysis.
The author of the article investigates the historical background of Munro’s story, Sophia Kovalevsky’s real biography and the subjective interpretation of her image and her life by Alice Munro, who highlights romantic feelings of her character and her search for happiness.
Special attention is given to the literary originality of the story. Munro is a master of third-person narrative, which Franz Stanzel described as “figural narrative situation”, and D. Zatonsky labeled as “narrative through characters’ point of view”.

woman, love, mathematician, image, narrative, happiness

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