Clusters of Mythological Traces in Contemporary Women’s Art

The subject of the study is a number of works of the first quarter of the 21st century created by Russian women — composers and writers. The structure and content of the works under study reveal the important trends for modern culture related to “feminine optics”, which justifies the relevance of research. The novelty of the research lies in revising the previous approaches to women’s creativity and introducing a new term for a previously unexplored phenomenon — a “cluster of mythological traces”. The author describes the examples of clusters in the Baroque music, the opera of the 19th century, and the music of the 20th century, and explains the difference between a cluster and a bricolage. The article analyzes in detail the cluster of mythological traces in the works by Sofia Gubaidulina, Elena Firsova, and in the media opera Einstein and Margarita... by Iraida Yusupova, which reveals connotations of many archetypal images and musical motifs. Additionally, it discusses a number of works in belles lettres, including Dead Pianists by Ekaterina Ru, Experiments on Yourself. Entertaining Diagnostics by Olga Shamborant, and the adventure novel The Ghost Ship by Victoria Platova. A special feature of clusters of mythological traces in literature is the active involvement of cinematic images and motifs along with the literary and mythological ones. Cinema, in turn, is also attracted to certain genres of literary creativity. An example of this is the paradoxical reference to the hagiographic literature in the film by Kira Muratova, The Sentimental Policeman. It is noted that a cluster of mythological traces is capable of both expanding the semantic field of the work and creating eclecticism, playing with various clichés. The conducted research for the first time reveals the sensemaking trend in women’s texts and analyzes its components. The author studies how clusters of mythological traces influence the features of poetics in sound and verbal creativity and puts forward hypotheses about the causes for the “feminine optics” and its peculiarities. A significant conclusion of the study is that the concept of a cluster of mythological traces in the feminine optics opens up a set of cultural concepts that support the function of preserving heritage in modern culture, especially in understanding the inseparability of origins, the infinity of meanings, and the scale of the worldview and the humanistic paradigm.