What does the author want to symbolize by the two main characters, the narrator and his girfriend, in "Autumn in the Oak Woods"?

Since the narrator and his girlfriend in "Autumn in the
Oak Woods" are unnamed, they symbolize in one sense the men and women of Russia in the
1950s (publication, 1961). It is also possible that they also represent the "Russian
soul"; all Russian and post-Revolution Soviet writers were in quest of defining, or of
"finding," the Russian soul.

The girlfriend is a city girl
from a harbor town. She discovers that she values the gifts and opportunities afforded
by life among the realities of a natural world, a natural world that is not idealized in
a Romantic period sense. The harsh realities of life in the wild meet her at every
instance, such as is demonstrated by the dark of night that she comes to shore in, the
chicken feather, and the snow. She thus symbolizes the connection of the female Russian
soul to the land of Russia. This connection stands in contrast to the denaturalizing
urbanization of Russian/Soviet city life.

The narrator is a
Russian man who feels the call of carving a life out of the beautiful though
realistically harsh essence of the Russian soil. He symbolizes the psychological
benefits derived that accrue (are naturally added to/from) from the Russian soil even
when it is covered by harsh, killing winter snows.

Yuri
Pavlovich Kazakov was among the writers who were affected by what is called the thaw
period in Soviet literature that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s during which time
censorship and government control of writers slackened its pace. During the the thaw,
two primary groups of writers developed.

One group was
comprised of authors devoted to revealing the social, cultural, political, and
technology realities of Soviet cities in the most realistic terms, something akin to
19th century English writers. The other group presented the struggle of peasants as they
sought to preserve their moral beliefs, which Tolstoy lauded in his stories, against
urbanites who aimed at urbanizing the peasantry. Kazakov took an independent route and
depicted individuals who resist denouncing the city but nonetheless choose the rural,
country life, with a similarity to the English writers of the Romantic period, only most
decidedly without their idealism of nature and the pastoral
life.