The study of the transformation of the image of women in the works of Russian literature of the 19th century and Chinese traditional poetry

Abstract

The study aims to identify culturally conditioned models of representing the female image in 19th-century Russian literature and traditional Chinese poetry, focusing on their ontological foundations and semiotic mechanisms of meaning construction. The goal is to compare the semantic fields and axiological emphases of the two traditions and to explain how philosophical and social attitudes shape differing discursive practices of depicting women. The methodology relies on comparative, hermeneutic, linguocultural, and discourse-analytical approaches; the corpus includes key novels of Russian classics (Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) and texts of the Book of Songs, Tang/Song poetry (Li Bo, Du Fu), and the lyrics of Li Qingzhao. Procedural steps include conceptual analysis of categories such as «person/harmony», «sincerity/ritual», mapping of thematic domains (death, separation, love, marriage, social role), and comparison of semiotic fields (natural and material symbols, spatial metaphors). The results show that the Russian tradition constructs the woman as a subject of spiritual-moral drama and existential choice, where passion and personal freedom conflict with social norms, while psychological detail and inner monologue form a «deep realism» of experience; Chinese poetry represents the woman as a bearer of harmony and ritually predetermined roles, where emotion is expressed indirectly through canonical images (plum blossom, jade, willow), and tragedy is predetermined by fate and separation rather than rebellion. The discussion clarifies that the differences lie in the anthropological modes «person-ideal» versus «order-harmony», which manifest themselves in the semiotics of nature (psychologized in Russian literature, cosmological in Chinese) and in the model of love/marriage (existential collision versus ritual-social function). The practical significance lies in translation studies, teaching Russian/Chinese as foreign languages, and intercultural communication; the limitations concern corpus representativeness and online biases. Future directions include quantitative psycholinguistic testing, expansion of generic and chronological scope, and refinement of metrics of cultural indirectness.