V. Tokareva's stories and novellas are attractive not only for their everyday stories, not only for the types of" little people " that Russian literature has always been so attentive to, but also for their philosophical understanding of the world, life, and people. Favorite characters of the writer are creative people not so much by virtue of their professions, but by their nature, by their essence. Most of all, they (as well as the author himself) are concerned about the problem of happiness. The characters reflect a lot, summarize their life experience, master the treasury of other people's experience accumulated over the centuries and cast in a concise, perfect form. V. Tokareva's prose is full of aphorisms, 11 short stories and 25 short stories contain 259 aphorisms. Consider those aphorisms in the text of the writer's works that represent someone else's thought in the flow of the author's or character's own thoughts. The functions of an aphorism in V. Tokareva's prose often depend on the way it is introduced into the author's narrative. Most often, this is a direct speech: "Markin did not marry for love ( ... ). Yegorov married (...) for passionate love. (...) Markin envied him. Lidka knew that her husband did not love her, and in order to keep her, she gave birth to his children almost every year. But Yegorovskaya Irina did not want to waste her beauty and youth, and her only son had to beg and beg at the cost of tears and humiliations. He had loved her for a long time, for fifteen years, and he had stopped loving her in one day. As Anton Pavlovich Chekhov said: "Marry for love or without love - the result is the same." So they had the same result with Markin, but at least there are children, and here are devastating, sizzling passions, which now, from a distance, seem to be nothing "("Long Day"). In this description of a specific life situation, key words form oppositions: "love is not love", "every year I gave birth to children - begging for an only son", "I ... Read more