Reflection of modern problems on the pages of the latest literature. Literature is the conscience of society (Moral problems of modern literature)

The events that occurred in the last decades of the last century affected all spheres of life, including culture. Significant changes were also observed in fiction. With the adoption of the new Constitution, a turning point occurred in the country, which could not but affect the way of thinking and the worldview of citizens. New value guidelines have emerged. Writers, in turn, reflected this in their work.

The topic of today's story is modern Russian literature. What trends have been observed in prose in recent years? What features are inherent in the literature of the 21st century?

Russian language and modern literature

The literary language has been processed and enriched by great masters of words. It should be considered one of the highest achievements of the national speech culture. At the same time, it is impossible to separate the literary language from the folk language. The first person to understand this was Pushkin. The great Russian writer and poet showed how to use speech material created by the people. Today, in prose, authors often reflect vernacular, which, however, cannot be called literary.

Time frame

When using a term such as “modern Russian literature,” we mean prose and poetry created in the early nineties of the last century and in the 21st century. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, dramatic changes occurred in the country, as a result of which literature, the role of the writer, and the type of reader became different. In the 1990s, the works of such authors as Pilnyak, Pasternak, Zamyatin finally became available to ordinary readers. The novels and stories of these writers have, of course, been read before, but only by advanced book lovers.

Liberation from prohibitions

In the 1970s, a Soviet person could not calmly walk into a bookstore and buy the novel Doctor Zhivago. This book, like many others, was banned for a long time. In those distant years, it was fashionable for representatives of the intelligentsia, even if not out loud, to scold the authorities, criticize the “correct” writers approved by it and quote “forbidden” ones. The prose of disgraced authors was secretly reprinted and distributed. Those who were involved in this difficult matter could lose their freedom at any time. But banned literature continued to be reprinted, distributed and read.

Years have passed. The power has changed. Such a concept as censorship simply ceased to exist for some time. But, oddly enough, people did not line up in long lines for Pasternak and Zamyatin. Why did it happen? In the early 1990s, people lined up at grocery stores. Culture and art were in decline. Over time, the situation improved somewhat, but the reader was no longer the same.

Many of today's critics speak very unflatteringly about prose of the 21st century. What the problem of modern Russian literature is will be discussed below. First, it is worth talking about the main trends in the development of prose in recent years.

The Other Side of Fear

During times of stagnation, people were afraid to say an extra word. This phobia turned into permissiveness in the early nineties of the last century. Modern Russian literature of the initial period is completely devoid of an instructive function. If, according to a survey conducted in 1985, the most read authors were George Orwell and Nina Berberova, 10 years later the books “Filthy Cop” and “Profession - Killer” became popular.

In modern Russian literature at the initial stage of its development, phenomena such as total violence and sexual pathologies prevailed. Fortunately, during this period, as already mentioned, authors from the 1960s and 1970s became available. Readers also had the opportunity to get acquainted with foreign literature: from Vladimir Nabokov to Joseph Brodsky. The work of previously banned authors has had a positive impact on Russian modern fiction.

Postmodernism

This movement in literature can be characterized as a peculiar combination of ideological attitudes and unexpected aesthetic principles. Postmodernism developed in Europe in the 1960s. In our country, it took shape as a separate literary movement much later. There is no single picture of the world in the works of postmodernists, but there is a variety of versions of reality. The list of modern Russian literature in this direction includes, first of all, the works of Viktor Pelevin. In the books of this writer, there are several versions of reality, and they are by no means mutually exclusive.

Realism

Realist writers, unlike modernists, believe that there is meaning in the world, but it must be found. V. Astafiev, A. Kim, F. Iskander are representatives of this literary movement. We can say that in recent years the so-called village prose has regained popularity. Thus, one often encounters depictions of provincial life in the books of Alexei Varlamov. The Orthodox faith is, perhaps, the main one in the prose of this writer.

A prose writer can have two tasks: moralizing and entertaining. There is an opinion that third-rate literature entertains and distracts from everyday life. Real literature makes the reader think. Nevertheless, among the topics of modern Russian literature, crime occupies not the last place. The works of Marinina, Neznansky, Abdullaev, perhaps, do not inspire deep reflection, but they gravitate towards the realistic tradition. The books of these authors are often called “pulp fiction.” But it is difficult to deny the fact that both Marinina and Neznansky managed to occupy their niche in modern prose.

The books of Zakhar Prilepin, a writer and famous public figure, were created in the spirit of realism. Its heroes mainly live in the nineties of the last century. Prilepin's work evokes mixed reactions among critics. Some consider one of his most famous works, “Sankya,” to be a kind of manifesto for the younger generation. And Nobel laureate Günter Grass called Prilepin’s story “The Vein” very poetic. Opponents of the Russian writer’s work accuse him of neo-Stalinism, anti-Semitism and other sins.

Women's prose

Does this term have a right to exist? It is not found in the works of Soviet literary scholars, yet the role of this phenomenon in the history of literature is not denied by many modern critics. Women's prose is not just literature created by women. It appeared in the era of the birth of emancipation. Such prose reflects the world through the eyes of a woman. Books by M. Vishnevetskaya, G. Shcherbakova, and M. Paley belong to this direction.

Are the works of the Booker Prize winner - Lyudmila Ulitskaya - women's prose? Maybe only individual works. For example, stories from the collection "Girls". Ulitskaya’s heroes are equally men and women. In the novel “The Kukotsky Case,” for which the writer was awarded a prestigious literary award, the world is shown through the eyes of a man, a professor of medicine.

Not many modern Russian works of literature are actively translated into foreign languages ​​today. Such books include novels and stories by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Victor Pelevin. Why are there so few Russian-language writers today who are interesting in the West?

Lack of interesting characters

According to publicist and literary critic Dmitry Bykov, modern Russian prose uses outdated narrative techniques. Over the past 20 years, not a single living, interesting character has appeared whose name would become a household name.

Moreover, unlike foreign authors Trying to find a compromise between seriousness and mass appeal, Russian writers seemed to be divided into two camps. The creators of the above-mentioned “pulp fiction” belong to the first group. The second includes representatives of intellectual prose. A lot of arthouse literature is being created that even the most sophisticated reader cannot understand, and not because it is extremely complex, but because it has no connection with modern reality.

Publishing business

Today in Russia, according to many critics, talented writers There is. But there aren't enough good publishers. Books by “promoted” authors regularly appear on the shelves of bookstores. Out of thousands of works of low-quality literature, not every publisher is ready to look for one that is worth attention.

Most of the books of the writers mentioned above reflect the events not of the beginning of the 21st century, but of the Soviet era. In Russian prose, according to one of the famous literary critics, nothing new has appeared over the past twenty years, since writers have nothing to talk about. In conditions of family disintegration, it is impossible to create a family saga. In a society in which priority is given to material issues, an instructive novel will not arouse interest.

One may not agree with such statements, but there really are no modern heroes in modern literature. Writers tend to turn to the past. Perhaps the situation in the literary world will soon change, authors will appear who are capable of creating books that will not lose popularity in a hundred or two hundred years.

Based on theoretical and practical material related to the specifics of the modern literary process, the basic concepts and terms of postmodern literature are revealed. An analysis of the artistic works of the best writers of Russian literature of the 20th century is given (V. Pelevin, V. Pietsukh, V. Sorokin, V. Makanin, etc.).

The manual is supplemented with a dictionary of terms, topics of reports for student presentations at a special seminar, as well as a list of fiction and scientific-critical literature recommended for studying.

Intended for philology students studying in the special seminar “Current problems of modern Russian literature: postmodernism.”

INTRODUCTION

Art, according to Jung, “intuitively comprehends changes in the collective unconscious.” Today, such a tectonic shift has become obviously inevitable, which causes a change in paradigms, and therefore, sets of values, types of consciousness, worldview strategy and attitudes.

In the 20th century, art became more complex, a special form emerged, which began to think of itself as a second reality, “competing with reality” (L. Aragon).

The goal of literature is not to copy life, but to model the world in its own image and likeness, to create a fundamentally new model of literature.

The basic principle of such literature is the destruction of life-likeness, erosion, destruction of species and genre boundaries, syncretism of methods, breakdown of cause-and-effect relationships, violation of logic - “nothing is a reason, no law reigns” (F. Nietzsche).

The aesthetic system of the new art is built on the active use of forms of artistic convention, hyperbolization, transformation of metaphors, a system of allegories, a play of contrasts, forms of the absurd, the grotesque, fantasy, and the complication of philosophical imagery. The mechanisms of the game are actively activated, and the element of play is manifested at all levels: play with meaning, plot, ideas, categories.

The functions of literature also change: cognitive, communicative, educational, moral and ethical, aesthetic. Traditionally, art was called upon to expand ideas about the world and man, to positively influence human nature, to help change the world and personality for the better, to ennoble the soul, and to develop an aesthetic sense.

The art of modern times is losing these abilities of cognition and changing life; it becomes a special playful way of the artist’s existence.

“In the new prose - after Hiroshima, after self-service in Auschwitz and the Serpentine Road in Kolyma, Ax Hill on Solovki - everything didactic is rejected. Art has no right to preach. No one can teach anyone, no one has the right to teach.” The meaning of this statement by Shalamov is quite clear: if the highest spiritual experience of world literature and great Russian literature did not stop the process of disunity of people, the savagery of man and did not overcome the instinct of mutual destruction, did not stop the rivers of blood - why are literature and art needed at all? Therefore, it is natural for the emergence of word artists who deliberately refuse to be an “instrument” for the spiritual provision of humanity. Credo contemporary artist: “Live not as you should, but as you want, if it didn’t work out as you should” (T. Tolstaya).

The world is again experiencing the situation of the Grand Inquisitor: the truth is not needed, the logic of common sense is needed. “Literature as a myth, as a way of understanding life, has decayed and is disappearing; human existence itself is meaningless, since everything around it is absurd and boring.”

Modern literature can be viewed on two levels: on the one hand, it can be perceived as a sharp departure to the side, an attempt to distort or slow down processes that are natural, organic for the development of literature; in this case, the rejection of the realistic tradition can be assessed as a complete destruction of literature, a dead end, the end , which is what many postmodernists state in their creative practice. In this sense, many evaluate postmodernism as the decadence of the 20th century, as an environment for intellectual provocations and social deception, as a kind of textual Satanism.

On the other hand, this artistic system must be comprehended in terms of a broad historical perspective, as a return to cultural values ​​at the level of approbation of tradition, introduction of various forms, adaptation to new conditions of reality, testing tradition for strength, for fracture, for rupture, research within the text of its individual artistic freedom.

Then the attitudes of postmodernism become clear, which neither denies nor affirms anything, but only introduces connotations of meaning by expressing doubt that something fundamentally new can be created at all. Postmodernism of this orientation not only plays with meaning, which often leads to an axiological explosion, but, in the words of L.N. Daryalova, “tragically outlives the classics.”

“New Russian literature doubted everything without exception: love, children, church, culture, beauty, nobility, motherhood, folk wisdom,” but this doubt, corroding the living body of literature, is of a tragic, and not an ironic, cynical nature.

In modern science, the postmodern search is sometimes assessed as an aesthetic counter-revolution, as a transitional phenomenon, growing pains, crisis, as art for art's sake, rebellion for the sake of rebellion, play for the sake of play. There is an opinion that the general line of Russian literature has always included psychologism and social relevance, which postmodernism deliberately and declaratively refuses, thereby meaningless the fact of its existence. Sometimes modern criticism refuses to look into the depths of a phenomenon and does not bother itself even with an attempt to clarify the essence of its claims. In this case, the conversation about postmodernism is purely emotional and evaluative. For example, reviews of A. Korolev’s novel “Eron”: “Scandalous, beyond the bounds of decency, a novel” (N. Ageev), “blatant vulgarity, a product monstrously tasteless,” “bad taste,” “despicable prose of masculinity” (S. Chuprinin) ; “A false classical rose has been grafted onto the wildflower of socialist realism in the stage of decay. It turned out to be a soap opera. A million red roses crossed with a million black toads.”

There is a concept: “criticism by silence.” If a phenomenon does not deserve conversation, why bother in vain? Moreover, this kind of criticism is a form of attracting attention, perhaps, to a work that is truly flawed in its aesthetic merits.

The modern literary process is such a complex and ambiguously assessed phenomenon that there is a need for a typological understanding of it, identifying leading trends, basic patterns that determine both the status and prospects for the development of domestic literature.

Postmodernism, as one of the most noticeable facts of the literary process of the late 20th century, covers various areas art, characterized by its spread in many directions, genre and thematic blocks, typological communities, determines the evolution of many writers and the traditional realistic movement.

The need has arisen to determine the place of postmodernism in modern Russian literature, in its connection with the previous literary tradition, which first of all requires identifying its essential nature, the degree of aesthetic value and innovation, and identifying the typological framework that distinguishes this phenomenon from other facts of Russian literature of the modern period.

POSTMODERNISM AS AN ARTISTIC SYSTEM

§1 Typological features of postmodern literature

If we summarize the signs of the postmodern artistic paradigm, properties, qualities, characteristics identified in the process of studying this phenomenon by both foreign (Ihab Hassan, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze) and domestic researchers (M. Epstein, N. Leiderman, M. Lipovetsky, M. Zolotonosov, S. Chuprinin, V. Kuritsyn, A. Yakimovich, etc.), it turns out that postmodernism has certain typological characteristics that can be “divided” into different levels:

1. At the content level.

Uncertainty, the cult of ambiguities, errors, omissions, hints, the situation of a “labyrinth of meanings,” “flickering of meanings.”

2. At the level of axiology.

Decanonization, the fight against traditional value centers (the sacred in culture - man, ethnicity, Logos, authorial priority), blurring or destruction of the oppositions good-evil, love-hate, laughter-horror, beautiful-ugly, life-death. In this regard, postmodernism, to some extent, is a philosophical “chimera”, an anti-system, a kind of modernized Manichaeism, if we use the concepts and definitions of, for example, L.N. Gumilyov.

3. At the composition level.

Fragmentation and the principle of arbitrary installation, the combination of incongruous things, the use of things for other purposes, disproportion, violation of proportions, disharmony, arbitrary design of amorphousness, the triumph of the principle: destruction and establishment of new connections in chaos.

4. At the genre level.

a) as a consequence of the destruction of traditional genres, the creation of forms of “intermediate literature” - in the words of L. Ginzburg (literature, theory, philosophy, history, cultural studies, art history are equally present within the framework of one genre-specific modification); genre syncretism.

b) A mixture of high and low genres, which is manifested, on the one hand, in the fictionalization of literature, in a departure, a declared rejection of edification, seriousness, and virtue in the direction of entertainment, adventurism, and on the other, in genre.

c) Polytextuality, the saturation of the text with extra-textual allusions, reminiscences, the presence of a broad cultural context.

5. At the level of a person, personality, hero, character and author.

The idea of ​​a person from the point of view of pessimism, the primacy of the tragic over the ideal. The triumph of the irrational principle, immanent consciousness, apocalyptic worldview, worldview.

6. At the level of aesthetics.

Emphasized anti-aestheticity, shock, outrageousness, challenge, brutality, cruelty of vision, craving for pathology, anti-normativity, protest against classical forms of beauty, traditional ideas about harmony and proportionality;

7. At the level of artistic principles and techniques.

a) Inversion (the principle of turning over, “turning over”).

b) Irony, affirming the plurality of the world and man.

c) Sign character, rejection of mimesis and the pictorial principle, destruction of the sign system as a sign of the triumph of chaos in reality;

d) Superficial character, lack of psychological and symbolic depth.

e) Game as a way of existence in reality and art, a form of interaction between literature and reality, the possibility of hiding true thoughts and feelings, the destruction of pathos.

Of course, all these characteristics are not unconditional and exclusive, characterizing the literature of this particular direction. Moreover, they can be present in the work of modern writers in varying degrees and degrees, sometimes only at the level, but there is no doubt that such trends are becoming more and more voluminous in Russian literature of the last third of the 20th century.

§ 2 The problem of man in the literature of postmodernism

In the post-humanistic era, human consciousness is permeated by a feeling of catastrophe, the end of the world, the Apocalypse, and what sociopsychologists call millenarianism. History begins to be perceived as a fatal process, humanity blindly submits to fate, foreseeing the fatal inevitability of the end.

The human personality, which in traditional ontological coordinates was the measure of all things, a self-valuable and self-sufficient category, reveals its inferiority.

There is an opinion that postmodernists do not have a concept of personality. A person is rather perceived as an anti-personality, an anti-hero and a kind of personified evil.

Indeed, postmodernism has rethought the possibilities and boundaries of human individuality. With such a vision of reality, when the subject of comprehension becomes only instability, chaos, fragmentation, and the absurdity of simulations, when the world expands from the macroworld of the Universe to the microworld of quarks, the very existence of an integral personality is problematic.

In the postmodern interpretation, a person turns, on the one hand, into a “negative space” (Rosalind Kraus), a “random mechanism” (Michelle Skress), a “fragmented person” (J. Derrida), “a person in a minus coordinate system”, etc. Roland Barthes, for example, generally developed a postulate about the death of the subject.

Such a rethinking of the role, capabilities of man, “man’s place on the coordinates of the Universe,” as L. M. Leonov once put it, led to the philosophy of anthropological pessimism.

It is necessary to distinguish between the anthropological pessimism that permeates the literature of the end of the century - the end of the millennium, explained by many socio-historical and moral reasons, and misanthropy. Anthropological pessimism is due to the awareness that man is imperfect, but understanding this already gives rise to a certain hope for the possibility of overcoming contradictions in the nature of the human personality.

Perhaps one of the first to define the basic properties of the human personality in the 20th century, the century of socio-historical catastrophes and the humanistic crisis of world civilization, was Robert Musil in “Man Without Properties.” In such a hero, all polar categories are taken to the extreme, binary is destroyed, everything is reduced to phenomena of the mediative series, and the result is spiritual annihilation and moral collapse.

This type of person is uniquely characterized by A. Yakimovich: “This is a creature who can engage in cannibalism and write a “criticism of pure reason,” this is all kinds of indescribable people, a brilliant cannibal, a virtuous beast, the most beautiful of freaks.”

Western European art of recent decades has widely explored the phenomenon of such “every possible person”, as in literature: Umberto Eco (“The Name of the Rose”, “Foucault’s Pendulum”), Milos Kundera (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), Patrick Suskind (“Perfume”), etc. etc., and in related arts, for example, in cinema: L. Buñuel (“This Vague Object of Desire”, “Beauty of the Day”, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”), Michelangelo Antonioni (“Zabrian Point”), J.P. Greenway (“The Draftsman’s Contract”), R. W. Fassbinder (“Berlin - Alexanderplatz”), F. Coppola (“Apocalypse Now”), etc.

Alogism and unmotivation of actions, unpredictability of behavior, irrationality of perception of the world, inability to set limits to one’s desires, needs, whims, immanent fear of the future, the instinct to destroy everything and everyone, together with a suicidal complex, determine the stereotype of thinking and behavior of heroes who, at the external level of their existence They have culture, subtlety, charm, grace, are in the status of demigods, and in their inner self (often in the imagination) they commit terrible deeds. The wild surge of negative, all-destroying energy cannot be explained by anything. The madness of anti-logic triumphs.

The tragedy of the collapse of matter and spirit is declared as the natural ending of a tragic age.

The inconsistency of the human personality, noted by F. Dostoevsky (“An angel fights with the devil, and the place of battle is the heart of man,” “Broad, broad is man, I would burden him”), in the literature of our time has been taken not just to the extreme, but to its logical an end beyond which the absurdity of human existence in general is revealed.

The source of this type of personality can also be found in F. Nietzsche’s concept of man:

“Man is something that must be overcome”;

“You have made the journey from a worm to a man, but much of you is from a worm”;

“Man is a dirty stream. You have to be a sea in order to accept it into yourself and not become unclean”;

“The greatness of man is that he is a bridge, and not a goal; the only thing worthy of love in him is that he is a transition and destruction”;

“Man is always on the edge of the abyss”;

“When you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss begins to stare back at you.”

This philosophical justification of personality includes not only F. Nietzsche’s prediction of a time when “great dragons will be born,” but also the affirmation as a given of the contradictory nature of human nature, intervention in which is devoid of any prospect. Such an understanding cannot be reduced to disbelief in human intelligence, activity, strength and the value of the individual; rather, it is a rejection of absolute truth.

Irrationalism in the approach to man is primarily associated with the problem of reason.

“The mind causes far more harm than good. The mind destroys more than it creates, is capable of confusing rather than clarifying any problem, and creates more evil than good.”

Postmodernism takes the attitudes of modernism to their logical conclusion, denying their essence. Modernism was based on disbelief in reason, misunderstanding of its weakness, disbelief that with the help of reason, which is highly imperfect, one can rationally understand the world and organize chaos. “The meaning of modernism is to contrast the rationalism of materialism with the originality of subjectivist interpretations of existence. The goal of modernism is the search for lost completeness and integrity in emotional memory (Proust), universal archetypes (Joyce), in poetry.”

Postmodernism, unlike the art of previous eras, postulates disbelief in that form of mental activity that can be characterized as Supermind.

Scientific discoveries XX century, refuting classical physics, naturally give rise to horror in the human mind, fear of how, with the help of superintelligence, man interferes with God’s providence, ultimately destroying himself and everything around him: splitting the atom, discovery of quarks, the creation of genetic engineering, supercomputers, the cloning method, which makes it possible to create a complete copy of the living creatures, implantation of embryonic cells into the brain for the purpose of overgenerating tissue, etc. The apotheosis of the madness of the mind is the discovery (still theoretical) of antimatter by Japanese scientists. The technology for creating antimatter has already been “worked out” on super-powerful computers; it’s just a matter of keeping it in a “material body.” The result of a triumphant mind can be annihilation, a kind of universal suicide.

The bitter conclusion with which we come to the end of the 20th century: having accumulated an incredible amount of completely useless and often dangerous knowledge, people have not become better and have not found the ideal path of spiritual and moral rebirth.

As O. Vanshtein writes, “the specificity of a person in the postmodern era is determined by the fact that he exists after the event of decentering has taken place and such familiar mythologems as God, Nature, Soul, Essence no longer work.

Instead of a mysterious and warm center, transcendentally signified, organizing the life and thoughts of adherents, a person of this type prefers to create a kind of empty space within himself, a kind of security zone that provides the opportunity to see himself from the outside, or, to use Bakhtin’s terminology, a position of being outside. And this pure, cold sector of the mirror serves as protection against the claims of substantivism in any form, be it an appeal to religious consciousness, or political engagement, biased judgment on any matter.”

This “out-of-placeness” can turn into an extreme, that is, death, as, for example, in V. Fokin’s play based on F. Dostoevsky’s story “Bobok”, where the audience on stage is presented with open graves in which lie the dead, who continue to quarrel in the next world , swear at each other, use foul language, blaspheme. The situation “beyond the line” does not change anything. There are no parallel worlds. There is a unity of an abnormal state human soul. Even death, as the highest form of solitude, does not change anything.

The protected space of the human personality, the “situation of being outside”, secured territory human consciousness, etc. in modern postmodernism, different ways of expression are found: alienation, pathological states of consciousness, escape into parallel worlds, agoraphobia, narcissism of an egoistic, individualistic personality. And the result is a feeling of the absurdity of each individual existence, a desire for the Absolute, for a certain World Soul, for the Emptiness, with which living beings merge or dissolve, losing their individuality.

Images of death and emptiness vary differently in the works of leading writers of this movement: “Before and During” by V. Sharov, “Chapaev and Emptiness” by V. Pelevin, “Time-Night” by L. Petrushevskaya, “Walpurgis Night, or the Commander’s Steps” » Ven. Erofeev, “The Last Judgment” by V. Erofeev, etc.

§ 3 Criteria of artistic value.

The innovative nature of the postmodern type of art

The question of the criteria of value, artistic significance, and aesthetic normativity remains open in relation to the art of modern times. Former traditional coordinates, oppositions:

a) aesthetic: beautiful-ugly, ideal-not corresponding to the ideal, expressive-inexpressive; b) epistemological: understandable-incomprehensible, -false, one-dimensional-, relevant-irrelevant, reasonable-unreasonable; c) moral and ethical: moral-immoral, good-bad, normal-abnormal, sacralized-destructive; d) emotional-evaluative: interesting-uninteresting, like-dislike, perceive-don’t perceive, etc. - have lost their meaning. Only innovation has value. Only the innovative nature can become the basis for the conclusion whether a work of art succeeded or failed. Various forms of contemporary art, for example, installations, happenings, performances, etc., are carried out precisely according to this principle.

“The avant-garde has always laid claim to a universal remaking of people’s consciousness, being paradoxical, it does not produce ready-made formulas and does not provide specific knowledge, its task is different: to provoke a search, intellectual participation, to create a new experience, to prepare a person’s consciousness for the most incredible stressful situations and world cataclysms "

Postmodernism fundamentally rejects the formulation of the problem of quality in relation to a work of art, and in terms of traditional operation of these concepts it appears to be a non-quality phenomenon, located outside the coordinate grid of traditional criteria; for him there are no strict priorities in matters of faith, philosophical and aesthetic preferences.

B. Groys, in the chapter “Strategy of Innovation” in his book “Utopia and Exchange,” provides a theoretical justification for the existing situation of poor quality of contemporary art. The meaning of the researcher's reasoning comes down to the following.

Every culture is organized hierarchically: structured cultural memory and environment constitute two levels in this structure. The profane environment is extremely heterogeneous; it consists of things that are not recognized by cultural institutions that ensure the storage of cultural memory. But it is precisely the profane environment, consisting of everything worthless, inconspicuous, uninteresting, uncultural, and transitory, that is a reservoir for potentially new forms and values.

What is the difference, for example, between Raphael’s “Madonna” and the urinal in the composition “Fountain” exhibited by M. Duchamp in Paris Museum. We are talking only about different visual forms. There are no criteria by which we could distinguish them by degree of value. There is no way to justify the differences between reasonable and unreasonable, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Nietzsche, Freud, and the structuralists showed that any statement or even an asemantic set of signs can in certain respects be considered equal to traditional wisdom. Postmodern strategy argues that all hierarchically organized oppositions can be overcome through the hidden identity of all things or deconstructed in an endless game of partial differentiations.

Therefore, the opposition between valuable and non-valuable is completely removed, and creation, creation, a work of art can be reduced to a simple process of movement. Innovation is the movement of things relative to the boundary separating valorized and stored culture from fluid and profane reality. And in this regard, postmodernism can be interpreted as a sign of the artist’s complete freedom to include anything in the artistic context and thereby valorize anything. A work of art ceases to be something essential and qualitatively different from any other thing; all traditional criteria of “made beauty” and expressiveness are canceled.

Each thing can be moved into the context of art, at least purely mentally, and not in reality. Duchamp's "Fountain" alone is enough to demonstrate the elimination of value hierarchies and mark either the end of art or the end of the profane - depending on taste. Structuralism, psychoanalysis, Wittgenstein's linguistic theory, one way or another operating with the categories of the subconscious, managed to convince that neutral, purely profane things do not exist, all things are significant, even if these meanings were hidden from a superficial glance.

Thus, something new in art arises when an artist exchanges the tradition of art for non-art, a traditional fine painting for Malevich’s “Black Square”.

To confirm his concept of art as profane, B. Groys cites an episode from Plato’s dialogues:

“And regarding such things, Socrates, which might seem ridiculous, such as hair, dirt, rubbish and any other rubbish not worthy of attention, you are also perplexed: whether or not for each of them it is necessary to recognize a separately existing idea, different from that , what do our hands touch?

“Not at all,” replied Socrates, “I only believe that such things are only as we see them.” To suggest the existence of any idea for them would be too strange... every time I approach this, I hastily flee, fearing to drown in the bottomless abyss of idle talk.

“You are still young, Socrates,” said Parmenides, “and philosophy has not yet taken complete possession of you, as, in my opinion, it will take over in time, when none of these things will seem insignificant to you.”

Russian prose of the late 20th century in its artistic quest is returning “to square one”; none of the things that come into the sphere of attention seem insignificant, and the art of postmodernism itself is self-sufficient in its aesthetic merits and is innovative, exploratory, experimental nature, has its own value system; claims to replace axiological guidelines.

§ 4 Classification: typological communities and trends in modern literature

The difficulty of understanding Russian literature of the late 20th century is due primarily to the fact that existing artistic phenomena, facts and concepts established in creative practice, do not have an exact formal definition at the theoretical and methodological levels.

For example, one of the trends in the literature of the post-Soviet period, which has general nature, at the same time called “chernukha”, naturalism, physiological prose (A. Genis), “daguerreotype” literature, “everyday” realism”, “shocking prose with a focus on brutality” (M. Zolotonosov), metaphysical sentimentalism (N. Ivanova ), tape realism (M. Stroeva), eschatological, apocalyptic prose (E. Toddes), etc. None of these designations makes it possible to fully determine the nature of the creativity of such different writers, similar perhaps only in their attitude, but not in their method and creative manner, like S. Kaledin, G. Golovin, N. Sadur, E. Sadur, Y. Kisina, N. Kolyada, Ven. Erofeev, F. Gorenshtein, M. Kuraev, etc. The general principle is manifested only in the fact that behind the external writing of everyday life, naturalistic analysis of reality, attention to human physiology, exaggeration of interpersonal relationships, the use of the technique of distortion of reality, exaggeration of the vices of the world, etc. d. a common beginning is felt, often manifesting itself in futile attempt the artist to penetrate into the mystery of human existence, which is measured by higher categories of spirit, and not matter.

As a consequence of theoretical inauthenticity in modern literary scholarship, a lot of parallel names arise to designate artistic phenomena of postmodern orientation:

1. At the level of determining the place in the chain of successive cultures: post-literature, meta-literature, post-avant-garde, trans-avant-garde, marginal culture, alternative art;

2. At the level of assessing the role that this art plays in the life of society, a person, from the point of view of social significance, psychological: counterculture, underground, brutal literature, shocking literature, literature in a negative coordinate system, shocking prose;

3. At the level of determining the innovation of content: literature of the new wave, “other” literature;

4. At the level of determining the innovation of method, genre, artistic form and techniques, formalistic experiment and aesthetic search: neo-avant-garde, neo-mannerism, neo-baroque, neo-modernism, neo-naturalism, neo-realism, art in the pseudo-Zen style (form without content).

A number of researchers, in an attempt to determine the direction of modern search and experiencing a lack of terms, use parallel and even competing terms (sometimes in the manner of an oxymoron): Romain Lothar - “modernity after postmodernity”, Edward Fry - “new modernity”, “protomodernity”, etc. .

O. Vanshtein in his work refers to the types of postmodernism identified as a working hypothesis in scientific group, led by H. Bertens and D. Fekkema.

1. The first type is based on the traditions of the avant-garde, and the political democracy of the avant-garde and direct focus on “raw reality” are contrasted in postmodernism of this type with high-brow, elitist, politically conservative modernism.

2. The second type is associated with the deconstructivist philosophy of J. Derrida. Literary works of this level are distinguished by their multi-layered structure, intertextual richness, broad cultural context, and deliberate fragmentation.

3. The third type is distinguished conditionally, since we are talking about commercial modifications of any types of poetics, blurring the lines between high and mass culture.

4. The fourth type affects more sociological and psychological aspects than literary ones. This is the general atmosphere of the era, the mood of the end of the century, a reaction to the typical conformism of Western civilization.

As we see, when identifying different types within one artistic system, different bases are revealed: in one case, opposition, alternativeness in relation to official ideology and traditional forms of art, in another case, it is an orientation towards a general eschatological mood, in the third case, the basis for typologization is purely formal signs, etc.

Attempts by researchers to introduce principles for limiting the diversity of the system have not yet been successful. Postmodernism as an artistic structure has not been fully classified or typologized. In the language of cybernetics, it looks like this: “A complex system with regulation of variations has a consistently high output only when the diversity of the control system is not lower than the diversity of the controlled object.” In the case of postmodernism and attempts to classify it, we observe the opposite pattern: the object itself turns out to be more diverse than the control system.

Hence the scatter in the definition of the components of this structure, even if these components have common, similar properties and characteristics.

A. Genis and P. Weil in the literature of this type and direction distinguish only “chernukha” and “avant-garde”; Ivor Severin - conceptual, untendentious and non-canonical tendentious literature; M. Zolotonosov - “shocking prose with a focus on brutality” and literature of aesthetic and formalistic experiment (which, according to the classification of A. Genis and P. Weil, corresponds to “chernukha” and “avant-garde”); N. Ivanova distinguishes “historical naturalism”; V. Erofeev - socio-historical naturalism (V. Astafiev, F. Gorenshtein, L. Petrushevskaya), opportunistic literature (Yu. Mamleev, Sasha Sokolov, S. Dovlatov), ​​the movement of literary cynics (E. Limonov), a group of “foolish writers” "(Ven. Erofeev, Vyach. Pietsukh, E. Popov), stylists (A. Sinyavsky, V. Sorokin), women's prose (T. Tolstaya), gay culture (Evg. Kharitonov).

Taking as a basis the existing and to some extent already identified by researchers types, directions, branches, trends, but taking into account the totality of similar features at the level of method, attitude, genre, style, artistic characteristics and techniques, we will try to give the following classification.

1. Conceptual literature. It is based on the multiplicity and arbitrariness of interpretations of the object (reality, person, historical facts, etc.), transformation of the archetype, visual emptiness, figurative transliteration, destruction of the literary cliche, borrowing at the level of hints, allusions, reminiscences, quotation mosaics. Any object, anything that can be intellectually interpreted, can be presented as an object of art in conceptualism. In other words, conceptualism is an intellectual interpretation of objects that can be included in the scope of one’s thoughts, be it text, a physical element of reality, or any communication. The formal representation of such an object, which is called a concept, is not particularly important.

Prigov D. Terry of All Rus'. The appearance of the verse after his death. A collection of warnings for various things.

Sorokin V. Queue. Norm. Factory committee meeting. A month in Dachau. Open season. Marina's thirtieth love and others.

Rubinstein L. Mom washed the frame.

Kibirov T. Latrines. When Lenin was little.

2. Untendentious prose. It is based on decanonization, desacralization, the destruction of traditional value centers, the amorphous nature of the genre system, and the active use of absurdist techniques.

Sokolov Sasha. School for fools. Between a dog and a wolf. Rosewood. Anxious doll. On the hidden tablets.

Kudryakov E. Boat of dark wanderings.

Popov E. Climbing. Soul of a patriot. Shitty tempered clavier.

Aleshkovsky Yu. A modest blue scarf. Nikolai Nikolaevich. Death in Moscow. Ru-Ru. Disguise.

3. Neo-naturalism. The artistic principle is an orientation towards “raw reality”, the identification of natural spontaneous processes with the laws of history, special attention to the crisis states of the human psyche, breaking down under the influence of cruel circumstances. As a consequence of an anatomically detailed study of “low” reality, the author is helpless, only recording the diverse forms of evil that is unpredictable and limitless in its possibilities.

Golovin G. Foreign side.

Kaledin S. Humble Cemetery. Stroybat.

Petrushevskaya L. Time is night. Your own circle. Insulated box. New Robinsons. Raw foot, or Meeting of friends.

Kuraev M. Night watch. Blockade.

4. Philosophical fiction. It is built on the continuation of the traditions of dystopia in world literature (E. Zamyatin, J. Orwell, O. Huxley, etc.). It bears the features of a parable, fantasy, and myth. A special role is played by forms of artistic convention, techniques of grotesque and parody.

Pelevin V. Problems of the werewolf middle lane. Six-fingered and Recluse. Vera Pavlovna's ninth dream. Omon Ra. Chapaev and Emptiness. Crystal world.

Borodynya A. Funk-Eliot.

5. Erotic prose. The subject of the image is the intimate sphere of human life, the study of the hidden, dark sides of the nature of the individual.

Modern erotica does not affirm the ideal of bodily beauty, but rather denotes the tragedy of its loss, distortion, and deformation of erotic feeling.

Narbikova V. Around ecology. Balance of light between day and night stars. And the journey of Remen. Visibility of us.

Korolev A. Eron. Lens burn.

6. “Brutal” literature. In its searches it relies on declared anti-aestheticism, the destruction of the beautiful-ugly norm, the poeticization of evil, the aestheticization of the terrible, abounds.

Erofeev V. Russian beauty. Last Judgment. Life with an idiot. Shit sucker. Smell of feces from the mouth. White neutered cat with the eyes of a beauty.

Limonov E. It's me - Eddie! Executioner. Young scoundrel. The night soup.

Yarkevich I. Childhood (How I crap myself), Adolescence (How I was almost raped), Youth (How I masturbated). Like me and like me. Solzheitsyn, or Voice from the Underground.

Kisina Yu. Flight of the dove over the mud of phobia.

Kolyada N. Slingshot. Our sea is unsociable. Murlen Murlo.

7. Eschatological (apocalyptic) literature. A look at man and the world from the point of view of anthropological pessimism, a tragic worldview, a harbinger of the end, the dead end in which human civilization finds itself.

Gorenstein F. Psalm. Redemption. Last summer on the Volga. With a wallet.

Kondratov A. Hello, hell!

Sadur N. South. Girl at night. Witch's tears.

Erofeev Ven. Moscow-Petushki. Walpurgis Night, or the Commander's Steps.

8. Marginal (“intermediate literature”).

Galkovsky D. Endless dead end.

Sinyavsky A. Walks with Pushkin.

Sharov V. Rehearsal. Before and during.

Kharitonov M. Line of Fate, or Milashevich's Chest.

Erskine F. Ross and Y.

Iljanen. And Finn.

9. Ironic prose. Irony becomes a way of destroying cliches at the level of ideology, morality, philosophy, and a form of protecting a person from inhumane life.

Pietsukh V. New Moscow philosophy. Enchanted country. Night vigils with Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Weller M. Legends of Nevsky Prospekt.

Polyakov Yu. Baby goat in milk.

Kabakov A. Tabloid novel. Last Hero.

Guberman I. Jerusalem Gariks.

Vishnevsky V. Odnostishiya.

Dovlatov S. Reserve. Compromise. Foreigner. Underwood solo.

The proposed classification is not unconditional, like any system that has diverse and often contradictory features, but, nevertheless, it seems that it makes it possible to some extent typologize a phenomenon that does not fit into the “Procrustean bed” of the theory.

THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF ART TO REALITY IN THE POSTMODERNIST PARADIGM.

ESCAPE FROM REALITY IN POSTMODERNISM LITERATURE

Questions about the relationship between art and reality, the subject of research and the cognitive capabilities of postmodern literature remain open.

Traditionally, the subject of study and comprehension in art was reality, reality, social environment, nature, the world of the human soul, in other words - the macrocosm and microcosm, the world and the human personality. Traditional forms of art have always faced the problem of truth, authenticity, authenticity.

Art formulated and pursued certain goals depending on the method, method, type of artistic generalization: a) to understand the world, to reproduce it in adequate forms; b) transform, improve, streamline the amorphous structure, harmonize chaos; c) give guidance for action, educate by positive example; d) modernize, introduce innovation; d) ennoble a person by influencing his soul and heart with the beauty of art.

Postmodern aesthetics does not set itself such tasks. For example, Vyach. Pietsukh in “Reflections on Writers” expresses his attitude to the problem of authenticity in art as follows: “Fiction is not a way of admiring or indignant reproduction of reality, it is a means of reproducing reality in a transformed, concentrated form, which is akin to cooking porridge from an ax, and the so-called A deep writer always correlates reality with reality like paradise with a sanatorium, a pathologist with a butcher, or, conversely, everyday theft with the initial accumulation of capital.”

What is ax porridge? In other words, it's all out of nothing. This idea is expressed differently by V. Pelevin’s hero in the novel “Chapaev and Emptiness”: “But desire still burns within us // Trains leave for it, // And the butterfly of consciousness rushes // From nowhere to nowhere.”

Foreign researchers of postmodern aesthetics (Carmen Vidal, Omar Calabrese, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, etc.) call the period of modern man’s existence an era of illusory appearance, theatrical illusoryness, inauthenticity of life, an era where truth, authenticity, reality no longer exists, and, for example , the scientific study “The Semiotic Problem of Garbage” becomes a sign of the devaluation of cultural values. The desire for infinity, meaningless freedom, the aesthetics of disappearance, social desertion, de-ideologization - features that characterize the consciousness of modern man, which has become a desert.

To characterize the time of postmodernism, Carmen Vidal resorts to the metaphysical concept of “fold,” “bend,” and curvature of space as a symbolic designation of the material or spiritual state of the world. D. Merleau-Ponty (“Phenomenologies of Perception”), Gilles Deleuze (“The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque”), M. Heidegger (“Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology”), J. Derrida (essay on Mallarmé) resort to the same concept.

The meaning of the researchers' reasoning is that matter does not move on its own along a curve, but follows a tangent, forming an endless porous texture replete with voids without any gap, where there is always a “cavity within a cavern”, a world arranged like a bee hive with irregular passages in which the process of folding-unfolding no longer means simply compression-uncompression, contraction-expansion, but rather degradation-development.

The fold, as K. Vidal claims, is always located between two other folds in the place where the tangent meets the curve - it does not correspond to any coordinate: there is no top and bottom, right and left, but always “between”, “always ", "both".

The researcher considers the fold to be a symbol of the modern era, a mandatory principle of the general cultural and political disorganization of the world, where emptiness reigns, in which nothing is resolved, where there are only rhizomes, paradoxes that destroy common sense, there is no definition of clear boundaries of the world and the human personality, the truth is that that not a single object, subject, project has an absolute character. There is no truth in anything. There is only betweenness, infinity and uncertainty.

What is faced by a modern person who is comprehending his condition in reality, and a modern writer who is trying to clarify these ideas about the world through various forms of creativity? “The world has become infinite for us: we cannot deny that it contains an infinite number of interpretations. Once again we are seized by great horror,” wrote F. Nietzsche, conveying the feelings of a person who has come into contact with something that cannot be unambiguously interpreted, posing the problem of understanding an increasingly complex world and determining the impossibility of realizing this intention.

An indefinite, indescribable person, “a person without properties” (as R. Musil defines the human personality), in a wavering, unsteady world that eludes knowledge and understanding, an indefinite, often falsely visible, mystified, apparent state where cause-and-effect relationships are broken , there is no logic and chronology, where the relationship between essence and appearance is violated or in general instead of essences there are only appearances (simulacra, “copies of copies”), where the famous thesis of Charles Ockham “Do not multiply the number of essences unnecessarily” is refuted - this is the reality that tries to reproduce the literature of postmodernism in adequate forms.

Writers of this direction, through their artistic practice, demonstrate the main principle: art is always conditional, life-likeness is imaginary, any artistic system is limited in its ability to fully reflect reality.

A. Genis cites the words of V. Nabokov to confirm his thought: “Reality is an endless string of steps, levels of understanding and, therefore, it is unattainable. Therefore we live surrounded by more or less mysterious objects” (“Transparent Things”).

An attempt to convey this feeling of modern man was difficult to understand, although it was undertaken by researchers of the work of the same V. Nabokov, who interpreted his thesis in different ways: “Art is a delightful deception.” This is the only thing that literature is capable of in such a concept of the relationship between art and reality. For which, for example, O. Mikhailov reproaches V. Nabokov: “Nabokov arrogantly rejected reality, saw in verbal art mainly a brilliant and useless play of the mind and imagination.”

In that understanding of the problem of the relationship between art and reality, which is found in the work of V. Nabokov, lies, perhaps, the fundamental principle of postmodern aesthetics: “Why do I write at all? To have fun... I do not pursue any goals, I do not instill any moral lessons. I just love writing riddles and accompanying them with elegant solutions.” Negative assessments of this feature of his work, declared, for example, in “Transparent Things”, are evidence of a misunderstanding of his main desire to convey the worldview of a person of the 20th century, who has difficulty perceiving strange, illusory spheres of existence that are not amenable to rational analysis.

The current state of literature confirms this: the pathos of the endless search for truth has given way to the poetics of similarities, appearances, appearances, “copies of copies,” simulacra.

The works of representatives of the new literature of the late 20th century illustrate this thesis. Reality in them is presented in the form of fantasy and simulation constructions, structures, artificial structures, non-existent worlds. In this series, a special place is occupied by the works of: V. Pelevin “The Werewolf Problem in the Middle Zone”, “The Crystal World”, “Chapaev and Emptiness”, “The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna”, “Six-Fingered and the Recluse”; F. Erskine "Ross and Me"; B. Kudryakova "The Boat of Dark Wanderings"; V. Shatrova “Before and During”, etc.

For example, reality in F. Erskine’s text appears as a set of uncertainties, where mythological times, historical eras, geographical constants, and heterogeneous characters are localized and whimsically connected at one point in space and time.

At the stylistic level, archaisms and modern jargon are arbitrarily combined, designations of details and everyday objects that do not coexist in any way in time, space, or in the consciousness of the reader perceiving this text: for example, “orange jaguar” (car) - “clatter of hooves” . The principle of an anachronistic depiction of a certain reality complicates the very attempt to adequately perceive the plot, which is only an imitation, where the questions are: where? When? Who? For what? Why? - remain unanswered. Reality is presented in the form of undifferentiated chaos: “The Count leaned out and saw fog, gray water and a crumpled bridge grate: it was broken by an orange jaguar, obviously losing control - now he was being pulled out of the water by three blueshirts in wet caps, who were helped by a dashing policeman. Dmitry Sergeevich leaned back on the pillows, closed his eyes and began to think under the clatter of hooves, how a mysterious criminal would behave in his place, having cleaned out the apartment and safe of his friend, the English envoy Mr. Dagardelli, and then brutally murdered a young maid, who, as Count Sievers guessed, judging by the upset face of the envoy, she was in an intimate relationship with him.”

The Bluebloods, English envoys, the policeman, Count Sievers and other characters will no longer appear in the text. The word “fog” at the beginning of this passage perfectly explains the meaning of this listing of characters. The experimental text, which creates the appearance of a plot, the illusion of intrigue, is organized in such a way that in the reader’s perception there is a complete understanding of the authenticity of what is happening, although in fact a reality is being constructed, which, for example, J. Baudrillard called a system of simulacra, “a phantom world of self-referential signs.” The writer does not even set himself the task of intellectually provoking, mystifying the reader with some far-reaching goal, he simply creates a text artificially stylized as classical prose of certain genres, the attributive level of which contradicts the internal meaning, but claims to be original, replacing the material world.

B. Kudryakov is even more consistent in this trend. His text “The Boat of Dark Wanderings” generally becomes a negation of any attempt to somehow differentiate reality: its texture, substance, objects, color, smell, dynamics. For example, epithets with the opposite meaning are combined, which does not make it possible to understand at all what is being said, but contributes to the reproduction of an “elusive” reality, a state of life in which everything is unsteady, shaky, and uncertain:

“But there are still a few piers to the island. Through the harsh Urzhovina, through the metastases of roads, through viscous days, through the thickets of beaten emotions, through the heat in the void, you reached this lake. Before this dark, light, clean, dirty, long and short, shallow, deep, full-water and waterless lake (our italics - L.N.). You knew that there would be a meeting here: with whom is unknown, but you guessed. On one girdle there was a catfish, on the other - a pike with three eyes and a silver earring on the gill - miracles began. A lotus-faced warbler appeared in the small forest of doom. Shards of laughter and the sound of dancing fell somewhere. Pies of consciousness surfaced. You leaned down to see the bottom. There was a movement there.”

I. Severin called this work “a variation in the word” about life after death. Indeed, the text is replete with various descriptions of death, death, decay, destruction, and deformation of reality. The process of annihilation is indicated at the lexical-stylistic level, since the uncertainty in the designation of the objective, material world indicates the blurring of the boundaries between being-non-existence, life-death, reality-unreality. Not named means it doesn’t exist. The destruction of the word in its material nature leads to the disappearance of reality, which is not recorded in consciousness and not imprinted in the text. “The hero, being behind the semi-opaque screen of an ended life, cannot think logically; at the moment when he crossed a border invisible to him and to us, his thoughts burned out, and when he tried to reanimate the silence of memory, the only thing that does not refuse to serve as a guide to him abandoned world is a stream of words - a poetic stylization of the “work of consciousness.”

V. Pelevin’s stories from the collection “The Blue Lantern,” the first of five books by the writer nominated for the Booker Prize in 1997, also reproduce a simulated reality, but in art world Pelevin, certain patterns are discovered, there is a logic of its own, and specific tasks are formed.

In the story “The Werewolf Problem in the Middle Zone,” the hero Sasha Lanin, by some infernal inner call, finds himself in the village of Konkovo ​​for a meeting of werewolves, in a phantom world in which there is a hierarchy of values ​​that does not coincide with the realistic, material coordinate system.

In the world, characters wear certain masks: the she-wolf Lena is a student, the leader of the pack is Colonel Lebedenko of the tank forces, etc.

The story is based on the contrast of feelings of the hero, who discovers the falsity of his external existence. The fantastic incarnation into a wolf, joining the pack of the chosen ones gives him a feeling of authenticity, freedom from the conventions of an odious, vulgar real existence.

The world perceived by other (wolf) sense organs - when hearing, vision, smell, etc. became more acute - was revealed in its true beauty, a truly embodied essence. The mystical action in the forest clearing revealed the inner side of reality for the hero, in the full sense it defined his dream, his longing for the truth.

Visible life turned out to be inauthentic, false, wretched, gray, devoid of poetry, mystery, mystery. When at the end of the story there is a trial of the pack over a traitor, an apostate, the worst thing that can happen and does happen is that the culprit in the form of punishment, punishment, is “gnawed into people.” The return to human form, to real existence turns out to be tragic, since it is a return to inauthentic existence.

In the story “Six-Fingered and the Recluse,” the conflict is also determined by the attempt of the “person” to escape from the wretched existence of the Incubator, where life itself is doomed to slaughter. The reality of the Incubator with the Wall of the World, Workshop No. 1, 10 eclipses, the Decisive Stage, the Great Judgment and the Deities evokes vague, indistinct associations with “Animal Farm” by J. Orwell, “We” by E. Zamyatin, the novel by O. Huxley “Brave New World” " But these parallels turn out to be indirect. The general thing is a feeling of horror in front of the incomprehensible, terrible, to which intelligent beings endowed with consciousness, intellect, and feelings are doomed.

Two chicken freaks: Recluse, with a philosophical mindset, and Six-Fingered, with disabilities in physical development, escaped into “subspace” from their world, rose above reality in an attempt to find the true meaning of life. The world, which was perceived as the only real one, in which mysterious, important, sacralized actions took place, performed by Deities in white coats, where the Sun shone, turned out to be just a dirty gray barracks of a poultry farm with painted windows and artificial lighting. "Where? “To the south,” he waved his wing towards a huge sparkling circle, only in color reminiscent of what they once called the luminaries.” The victim escapes from the “web” of false appearance, gaining the same illusory freedom, but this illusoryness of future happiness in free flight is the only thing necessary for the heroes.

In the story “The Life and Adventures of Barn No. XII” real world also appears in its most unsightly and vulgar expression: a vegetable warehouse, barrels of cabbage, a manager with a fat belly, tied with a dirty apron, half-drunk workers. This vegetable warehouse owns sheds No. 13 and 14, which shed No. XII despises, feeling itself an order of magnitude superior, since in its mysterious twilight it stores ringing bicycles, the return of which from a walk it awaits, like faithful dog. The feeling of one’s specialness, significance, chosenness, exclusivity gives the life of barn No. XII the highest meaning. And when the owner of the bicycles sold the barn to a vegetable warehouse and the workers rolled into it a barrel, swollen, greasy, with the corpses of sour cucumbers, the barn fainted, lost consciousness, fell into frustration, as a tragic collision occurred between the real and the imaginary, dream and reality, the highest the meaning of life and raw reality.

And in one beautifully dramatic moment, unable to bear the weight of external existence, of false existence, the barn shorted out the electrical wire, set itself on fire, destroyed its false shell, and broke free. Silhouettes of bicycles with silver bells flashed in the smoky flames rushing into the sky as a sign of achieving complete harmony of life and dreams.

Almost all of V. Pelevin’s work, the genre of whose works is difficult to define (myth, fairy tale, fantasy, dystopia, philosophical prose, etc.) is built on an inverted opposition, where the truth of the conventional and the falsity of the real are affirmed. V. Pelevin's fiction turns out to be a copy of a causeless world, in which instead of reality there are only imaginaries.

The novel “Chapaev and Emptiness” logically continues the development of the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe destruction of visible reality, in it the author exaggerates and hyperbolizes the traditional techniques for his work, since the action of the novel generally takes place in absolute emptiness.

The division commander Chapaev, the decadent poet Pyotr Pustota, the security officer Plywood, Simply Maria, the hollow bust of Aristotle, the Black Baron - all the “characters” of the novel exist in a world that has the property of “disappearing into nowhere.” The concept of Inner Mongolia, which arises around the one who sees the Emptiness, becomes an expression of not just alienation, loneliness, internal self-isolation, but is already of a global ontological nature.

“We are nowhere simply because there is no such place that we could say that we are in it. That’s why we are nowhere,” says Pyotr Pustota to Chapaev.

In this regard, the work of artists who are not directly included in the system of purely postmodern predilections is also undergoing an interesting evolution.

A. Voznesensky, in his poem “The Folding Mirror,” thinking in terms of postmodern analysis of reality, plays on Flaubert’s image of creativity as a mirror with which the writer walks along the high road, absorbs, embraces, reflects everything in it: the top, the bottom, and the transparent skies , and puddles on a dirty road:

Lyrical mirror There is hope in you, You're a freak, you're a creep, The child is a sun-seeker, You are the heart of a beauty, Where is Al Rashit watching? They spat on you, mirror, They trampled, beat, sparkled, Gogol's mirror, You won't be crushed. What can you guess, mirror? Tea, teapot - st. Herzen? The boy has alien eyes, For the filmmaker - Brigitte. Unbreakable mirror What is your telex about, mirror? And the mirror will break - Then life will be shattered.

In the concept of A. Voznesensky, creativity is a mirror that, reflecting an object, simultaneously “turns it over”, creating an external resemblance to a living thing (you want to touch your double, but you only feel the coldness of the glass).

The problem of falsity, illusoryness, mirages of consciousness, deception that visible things contain is posed.

Reality is simulated, dreams are shattered by reality, truth is illusory and unattainable. Literature, as a form of reflection and comprehension of life, is not capable of conveying the essence; it deals only with appearances. It gives a picture of the world in which everyone sees only what they want to see: a filmmaker - Brigitte, a beauty - Al Rashita, etc.

On the other hand, the mirror does not distort anything, but, showing the ugliness and imperfections of the world and man, it only reveals the existential meaning of things, builds its relationship with reality on the “Dorian Gray effect” (inner ugliness, depravity, evil are hidden under an outwardly beautiful shell). Distortion and curvature of the image only restore the disturbed order of things, the harmony of genuine correspondences, destroying the boundary between the sign and the signified.

The folding mirror becomes an expression of the very aesthetic principle of postmodernism - to decompose, destroy the whole into its components and through this destruction restore the lost essence. It is not the mirror that is crooked, but reality itself that exists in a minus coordinate system.

Moreover, each of the subjects who perceive reality (a freak, a beauty, a child, a filmmaker, etc.) turns out to be a bearer of truth within himself, projects his feelings and ideas onto the world, and acts as an idealistic transformer of truth.

The functions of such a metaphorical mirror are varied: “cover mirror”, “sun catcher”, “heart” - and depend not on the object, but on the desire of the perceiver to transform it in his own image, likeness, desire, therefore “if the mirror breaks, then life will break.” It is not reality that is true, eternal and infinite, but a fragile, elusive, whimsical, subjective form of its reflection. Postmodernism in this sense is a sign of the looking-glass life of literature, which does not recognize any analogy with life.

The multiplicity of meanings and ways of interpreting the images and ideas of the poem allows us to talk about the influence of deconstructivist philosophy on the work of A. Voznesensky in his last works, and the presence of postmodernist sentiments in his artistic world.

The pathos of denial of reality in the literature of this direction is sometimes realized in the motif of wandering, traveling (most often in the imagination of the hero), swimming, devoid of temporal and spatial coordinates and goal setting.

In this regard, it is interesting to compare two works where this motif is present in one form or another, no matter how unexpected this parallel may seem: “The History of the World in 10½ Chapters” by the modern English writer J. Barnes and our compatriot, playwright N. Kolyada.

The entire text of D. Barnes is based on the creation of a kind of anti-plot with a torn plot, where the entire world history is presented in a leapfrog of eras, a mosaic of landscapes, a chaotic flickering of characters, a rethinking of classical plots of world history and literature: the Book of Job, Jonah in the belly of the whale, medieval disputes of the scholastics ( brilliantly stylized by the writer) about how many angels can be placed on the point of a needle, tragicomic episodes of modernity, etc. Structurally, the text is a genre kaleidoscope (from the fragments a likeness imitating the genre is assembled, which includes travesty, deheroizing mythology, aesthetic treatise, philosophical essays, reportage in the form of letters and telegrams, western, pseudo-historical action movie, etc.). The integrity of the world and culture is completely destroyed. Unity is created according to the laws of cohesion only by the motive of swimming. “And the ship sails on”... A metaphor for meaningless movement in the void is Noah’s Ark, sailing to nowhere, since, in addition to “all creatures in pairs,” there were five wood-boring beetles on board, on whose behalf the story is told. A grandiose picture of a world is created, at the base of which a crack originally formed, which is rotten through and through and will soon collapse. The external existence of the world is meaningless, so it is slowly and surely, from the very beginning of its foundation, being undermined from within. The world is finite already at its very beginning.

“Our Sea is Unsociable” by N. Kolyada in the form of a parable and tragic farce carries the same idea. The metaphorical sinking ship-home (a kind of Noah's Ark) becomes a symbol of ontological trouble.

A Soviet communal apartment flooded with sewage, a torn T-shirt instead of a sail, heroes who seem programmed to do dirty tricks, nasty things, evil - this is the objective image of the reality constructed in the artistic world of N. Kolyada.

The problem of incompatibility of people who find themselves within not only this peculiar Noah’s Ark, but the entire earthly space is posed.

The writer plunges his heroes into the elements of undifferentiated chaos, testing their human worth with low reality. Exploring the human soul in a situation of separation-unity, alienation-consent, understanding-hostility, embitterment-reconciliation, the writer reserves for the heroes the right to prefer good to evil, but this choice remains problematic and is outside the scope of the plot.

An ontological dead end is revealed, people find themselves trapped in their base existence, but they themselves must find a way out. Dreams, dreams, fantasies, illusions and cruel vision, the brutality of the real. Blasphemy coexists with faith, prayer with curses - human life has lost its guiding principles, transformed into the image of a “lost soul” wandering in the emptiness of existence. Noah's Ark, overpopulated, overloaded not only with the inhabitants of the world, but also with all sorts of vices, whose name is the Evil of the World, sails to Nowhere, without a rudder or sails, without purpose and meaning. A similar eschatological motif unites many works of literature of the postmodernist worldview.

Wandering, swimming, wandering, flying, traveling, etc. - all lexemes that carry the meaning of movement turn out to be signs of static, stopping, the finitude of a world doomed at the very beginning of its history.

The problem of the relationship of art to reality is directly related to the verbal and figurative way of its reproduction.

Researchers have never disputed the semiotic nature of modernist and avant-garde art. Postmodernism, like the avant-garde, to a certain extent turns out to be a sign system for initiates. Depending on the perception: “a hat or a boa constrictor that swallowed a rabbit,” if we recall A. de Saint-Exupéry, the art of postmodernism finds its admirers.

Signals, signs, supporting words, “the meaning of nonsense” - the work of many modern writers is based on this, and these signals, signs, symbols, as a rule, turn out to be false.

In this aspect, the art of postmodernism is characterized by the replacement of an informative manner with a concentrated, figurative, coded one.

The most interesting writer working in line with such aesthetics is Vladimir Sorokin.

A. Genis sees elements of the absurd in V. Sorokin’s style. Wild phrases like “The milky look is a sweaty sislo,” which ends the story “Pouch,” according to the researcher, serve as a sign of the poetics of the inexplicable. They cannot be decrypted, but can be used. Sorokin is engaged in non-human art. To understand why he needed mysterious “types”, we can use an analogy from mathematics. There is a concept in it that has no meaning, for example, an imaginary number is the root of minus one. Mathematicians, using what cannot exist, what they cannot even imagine, come to quite clear and practical results.

It is necessary to remember that this is precisely where, for example, the hero of Zamyatin’s novel “We,” D-503, “broke,” believing that it is possible to integrate everything, “from Shakespeare to the cretin.” On things whose knowledge is unattainable, and whose interpretations are numerous, the poetics of the absurd is built, which has become an integral element of the aesthetics of postmodernism.

When in 1915, K. Malevich’s “Black Square” was hung like an icon in the red corner of the hall, the esthete A. Benois remarked: “Undoubtedly, this is the icon that the Futurists put up instead of the Madonna icon.” Malevich himself wrote in the 1922 Manifesto: “Reality can neither be represented nor knowable. Through blissful peace and contemplation it will be possible to go to God, through feeling, intuition.”

The art of modern times is also characterized by zero textuality of objects, “asceticism of meaning” (the expression of T. Adorno).

An indicative feature of V. Sorokin’s work was the image of the world as a system (“chaosphere”) of disintegrated signs.

For example, in the story “Meeting of the Factory Committee” a certain “schizoreality” (the expression of A. Genis) is recreated; first, protocol-detailed sketches are given, designed in the style of an official event, at which the careless worker, drunkard and truant Vitka Piskunov is “worked out”, and then a sharp transition to an action reminiscent of a cannibal feast, the laws of the absurd begin to apply. This transition does not have a clear boundary and is not explained by any reasons, motives, or logic. There is a shift in reality, a “tectonic shift”, a rift in the spatio-temporal state of the world, which is accompanied by an explosion of the sign system with the subsequent annihilation of meaning.

As A. Genis writes, in one of the fragments of the novel “Norma”, written like the classics, resurrecting Chekhov’s life, Turgenev’s love and Bunin’s nostalgia, the text was supposed to play the role of genuine life, to represent the natural, original, normal state of affairs, a falling away from which and led to a monstrous “norm” (eating excrement according to someone above the approved plan). But Sorokin, with a skillful maneuver, destroys the illusion he himself created. Suddenly, without any motivation, a rude, obscene remark breaks through into this text, precisely stylized to resemble the classics. It punctures, like a balloon, the false value of this seemingly true universe. So consistently to the point of pedantry and ingeniously to the point of disgust, Sorokin exposes the falsely signified, demonstrating the metaphysical emptiness left in the place of the disintegrated sign. This emptiness in the novel corresponds to either the lines of the endlessly repeating letter “a”, or abracadabra, or simply blank pages.

So in “Meeting of the Factory Committee,” the destroyed dialogue, previously replete with industrial vocabulary and idiotic bureaucracy, flows into a meaningless stream of words: “cut through,” “that and cut through,” “ota-ota-ta,” “perforated,” “killer.” ", "drawn out", "stuffed with worms, stuffed." Monstrous words with chopped off inflections are no longer identified as full-fledged signs, but the meaning can still be guessed from the remaining parts. Further, just as glands, burnt wires and contacts begin to fall out of a broken mechanism, so here a full-fledged word begins to turn into verbal garbage, something is issued that is no longer subject to any laws of logic and meaning: “Pipes, universal breakdown pipes GOST 652/58 according to unaccounted for, - Urgan muttered, together with everyone else, pressing the cleaning lady’s body to the table. “The length is four hundred and twenty millimeters, the diameter is forty-two millimeters, the wall thickness is three millimeters, the chamfer is 3x5... It’s perforated... that’s how it’s tested,” the cleaning lady muttered.”

S. Zimovets, analyzing V. Sorokin’s story “A Month in Dachau,” written in the form of a diary of a writer spending his vacation in a concentration camp, defines a similar stylistic device as “automatic writing” that conveys the internal disintegration of personality.

The hero consistently moves from one torture chamber to another, and “automatic writing” records his horrific suffering.

“Camera I. Immediately cute when in a chair it’s like a dentist and there are pliers and you are my darling with a stack and naked below and they tied me up with tiles, a lot of light and first you hit my legs with a whistle until I bruise and I cry and then there are pliers and a nail on my little finger.”

The agony of the body in the ever-increasing procedures of torture reaches the limits of anthropological possibilities, and this process is emphasized by the successive destruction of first the syntax, then the grammar and morphology of writing:

“Camera 15. Punching and perforation needle needle-making Christ-Christ-skinned god-meat corpse beating gutting clack clack clack of this prognoe progneous corpse-skin nobility corpse-skinned noble e.g.

The energy of erecting the tortured body as a sign can no longer be based on an existential or ontological situation. Seme creeps onto seme, morpheme onto morpheme, and we are dealing with complete semiotic incest.

The process of destruction of the sign system is directly proportional to the process of decay of life in the writer’s artistic world.

Thus, V. Sorokin, perhaps, most consistently implements the thesis that “the art of words destroys reality.” The reality reproduced in his books through verbally formulated schizophrenic delirium and automatic writing is dead in its very essence. It is impossible to convey it in any other form of speech, in any other way of reproduction.

Thus, writers of the postmodernist movement declare and illustrate with their work the principle of denial of reality in the form of a kind of spiritual escapism, escape from life, and rejection of false appearances. The forms of such spiritual escapism can be different:

Death, or the borderline state of “life after death”:

Kudryakov. Boat of dark wanderings.

D. Prigov. The appearance of the verse after his death.

Mystical-fantastic state and feeling of the hero:

V. Pelevin. The werewolf problem in the middle lane.

A. Borodinya. Funk - Eliot.

Virtual reality in the world of a computer game:

B. Pelevin. Prince from Gosplan.

"Schizoreality":

V. Sorokin. A month in Dachau. Factory committee meeting. Norm.

Destroyed life-likeness of plots and situations, curvature of space and time:

F. Erskine. Russia.

The situation of a madhouse, “rescue” in madness from an even crazier world:

V. Pelevin. Chapaev and Emptiness.

V. Sharov. Before and during.

Yu. Aleshkovsky. A modest blue handkerchief.

A variety of forms of forced and voluntary isolation of a person:

L. Petrushevskaya. Insulated box. A dark room. The time is night.

“Visions” of a sick imagination:

Yu. Kisina. Flight of the dove over the mud of phobia.

Spiritual “foolishness”:

N. Sadur. South.

E. Sadur. Flying from shadow to light.

Ven. Erofeev. Moscow-Petushki.

Sailing on the sea of ​​life without purpose or meaning:

N. Kolyada. Our sea is unsociable.

Refusal of knowledge, fear of life, horror of the unknowable and inexplicable lead to the denial of reality itself, which is perceived only by appearance, and not by essence, “a copy of a copy.” In the artistic practice of postmodernism, M. Heidegger’s thesis is consistently implemented: “The art of words destroys reality.”

POSTMODERNISM AS “ENERGY CULTURE”.

THE PROBLEM OF TRADITION

One of the famous theorists of conceptualism, B. Groys, writes that the concept of postmodernism allows for multiple interpretations, but its essence lies in the fundamental doubt about the possibility of creating a historically new one, in contrast, for example, to modernism in its various manifestations and modifications aimed at overcoming the old , on and innovation. The essence of postmodern art is that it corrects attitudes that have revealed their inconsistency.

Therefore, it is important for understanding the nature of literature of a given artistic orientation to question not only the form of its relationship to life (copying, imitation, recreation, denial, re-creation, etc.), but also the ways of relating to an already existing culture, literary experience, classical tradition .

Researchers have repeatedly noted that one of the defining features of Russian literature at the end of the 20th century is its reliance on cultural texts, the creation of a secondary artistic model, a test of strength and rupture of classical aesthetic forms. And in this regard, postmodernism is not so much a system as a process of comprehension, a return to what has already been “developed” by world artistic practice.

Vyach. Kuritsyn was one of the first to introduce the concept of “energy culture” into literary use in relation to postmodernism: “Realism is a woman’s youth, realism is maturity, decadence is the last surge of emotions of an aging woman, postmodernism is wise old age. Not just culture, but energy culture, because new artistic thinking deals with the second reality, drawing out the energy of the spirit from it.”

There is an opinion that postmodernists, with their creativity, are the end of literature, defining its postliterary and metaliterary pathos.

But this “end of literature” has a peculiar character: “Whatever the silent literature, it testifies: literature is over, exhausted, completed. She's done everything she can, and it's time for her to leave the stage, hunched over, shuffling her feet. The solemnity of this melancholic picture is spoiled by the fact that literature has already been said goodbye - from antiquity to the present day, critics have been digging its grave. Belinsky began his career with an accidental exclamation: “So, we have no literature.” And he wrote 13 volumes of criticism about the missing subject... Such a long experience of literary eschatology, such a funeral that dragged on for centuries cannot but be alarming. Are we confusing the death of our cultural model with the Last Judgment?”

The image of the Tower of Babel, which collapsed at the moment it reached its greatest height, becomes a metaphor for the modern state of art.

Fundamental to the artistic thinking of postmodern writers is the feeling of being inside someone else’s artistic consciousness, worldview, text, intonation. The reminiscent nature of modern thinking is explained by the state of the so-called “blank slate” in literature, already filled on both sides. It remains possible to write only between the lines, finding your own niches, cells, lacunae, voids in the artistic texture. It is no coincidence that the “dizzying joy of recognition” (O. Mandelsham) that the reader experiences when getting acquainted with postmodern texts. There is a well-known historical anecdote about a Florentine poet who stole the work of the poet Dante and, filling it with his own poems, read his creation to the palace jester. With each stolen verse, the jester took off his cap and bowed. When the unlucky writer asked what he was doing, the jester replied that he was bowing to old acquaintances.

The talent of a writer with a postmodernist worldview manifests itself under the special condition of being in someone else’s text, being introduced into someone else’s artistic consciousness and thinking. But this “abduction” has a special nature and other goals than banal borrowing.

O. Vanshtein designates such phenomena with the term “appropriation,” which becomes a game maneuver in a situation of decentering, when the coordinates of “friend or foe” are shifted, “dekulakization” occurs in the sphere of intellectual property: “Entering the common intertextual space, the destruction of historical coordinates implies total appropriation traditions. The synchronization of cultural tradition gives rise to such a way of self-expression of art as appropriation.”

Regarding many authors of modern literature, one can speak of double appropriation. There was even a definition of style, author's manner, direction in art, as “appropriate art”, or “rewriting”. For example, the authors of the almanac “Ecumene” call “rewriting” perfect shape creativity (D. Papadin).

In the texts modern authors the principle triumphs: “Everything is foreign - and everything is yours.” A talented interpreter, interpreting someone else's text, becomes a co-author, building his work from ready-made bricks, he imitates the author, who also freely handles his material - life.

Vl. Sorokin expands this feature into a whole concept: “For the first time I understood what I was doing, although before that I had done the same thing. My first works contained a lot of literary elements, however, even then I used some literary clichés, not Soviet, but post-Nabokov. Bulgakov seemed to have deduced a formula for me: in pop art culture, everything can be made into art. The material can be Pravda, Shevtsov, Joyce, and Nabokov. Any statement on paper is already a thing, it can be manipulated in any way you like. For me it was like the discovery of atomic energy."

In other words, borrowing is not a manifestation of the “energetic character” of a culture of this type and is not the end of literature, since literature - as a second reality, an already existing artistic model - is the same object for interpretation as the “living” reality, reality; in this second reality there is no concept of “friend or foe”. The author, having given a “start to life” to his work, is no longer its owner, therefore one can without a doubt appropriate someone else’s work, a creation, since it is no longer anyone’s property, but only a form, a model, “another reality.” Just as there is no monopoly on historical truth, there is no monopoly on artistic truth.

An interesting example in this regard is the famous masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci “La Gioconda”, a reproduction of which was published in 1919 French artist Marcel Duchamp, who worked in the “ready-made” technique, corrected it by adding a mustache and goatee to the Mona Lisa.

The public perceived this as ridicule, mockery, mockery, accusing the artist of masochism and regarding this act as creative sterility, the powerlessness of the author, an expression of his insolvency, a manifestation of a complex of insignificance, mediocrity, which swung at a genius.

Nevertheless, M. Duchamp’s “Mona Lisa with a Mustache” is an independent, original work of art. Duchamp did not set himself a task of travesty level. With his artistic action, he did not ridicule, but only questioned and introduced new meanings, additional shades, adjustments, destroying the usual standards, norms, ideas:

1) tried to unravel the mystery of history, which even I. Bunin considered equal to the mystery of the Iron Mask, and to some extent anticipated subsequent hypotheses (or speculations) put forward by American scientists who scanned the picture and found it inverted from left to right male portrait, more precisely, a self-portrait of da Vinci himself;

2) restored the balance and harmony in the concepts of beautiful and ugly that had changed over time, affirmed the historical and aesthetic relativity of the concept of “beauty”: the eyebrowless Mona Lisa with a snake-like smile on her lips does not correspond to the ideas about the ideal accepted in the 20th century. M. Duchamp, with his creative gesture, outlined the nature of the beautiful, the ideal, which is contradictory, unattainable and generally ambivalent. Beauty is not a standard, but a search for truth;

3) finally, M. Duchamp “ruined” not a masterpiece of a Renaissance artist (he didn’t throw acid, like the maniac in the Hermitage on Rembrandt’s “Danae”), but only a reproduction, a postcard, a “copy of a copy”, produced a “double appropriation”, the purpose of which is not the destruction of the aesthetic ideal, no matter what additional meanings were revealed as a result of this action, but “liberated” the human consciousness, destroying the “cliché”, something that was replicated in millions of copies, became an attribute, like Margarita’s knee swollen from kisses at Satan's ball.

If this artistic gesture raised the question “why?”, it means that an act of creativity occurred, and as a result, the phenomenon of art took place, since there is a concept - an object that raised questions and became the subject of multiple interpretations.

Ihab Hassan (“The Dismemberment of Orpheus”) initially views postmodernism as a kind of painful virus that develops within the literature of the previous period, for example, modernism, bringing the development of tendencies of linguistic play to the extreme through the experimental introduction of heterogeneous quotations and allusions into the text. In this regard, postmodernism has become a kind of “experimental ground where elements of different aesthetics collided” (V. Greshnykh).

As many researchers note, centonism, “text patchwork”, mosaic and collage in the structure of works of modern literature have become epidemic. Complex forms of “hidden” and “rearranged” quotes, the inclusion of individual lines in one’s own poems, replacement of context, and the use of intonation and rhythmic models of other authors become not just an artistic device, but a principle in the creative practice of modern authors (A. Eremenko, D. Prigov, I. Zhdanov, V. Vishnevsky, T. Kibirov).

At first glance, the alternating combination of lines of textbook poems by Pushkin and Lermontov, which is simple and does not require special versification art, was included by F. Erskine in the structure of his text “Ross and I” not only for the purpose of a playful maneuver, but to prove, among other things, the priority of form over content . Poetic meter, melody, and intonation in this case are self-sufficient in nature and do not depend on the content they formulate:

Tell me, uncle, it’s not for nothing that When I seriously fell ill, Moscow, burned by fire, And I couldn't think of anything better.

V. Vishnevsky widely uses this technique, “dashingly” combining his own and someone else’s text, original images and common cliches, destroying through this unexpected combination a stable idea of ​​​​a particular fact, phenomenon, object:

It lies on the hills of Georgia, but not with me. Where Gorky wrote “At the Depths”, I'm confident in the future. The purpose justifies the detergents. We also didn’t read everything Schnittke did. Darling! End of quote... Men! persistently seize women! Have you come to settle forever?

Such phrase construction can be qualified as “sublimation of suppressed aspirations”, as a manifestation of a kind of inferiority complex. If we follow the well-known statement of S. T. Coleridge that poetry is the best words standing in the best places, then, of course, V. Vishnevsky hopelessly ruined Pushkin’s bright line and outraged holy feelings. At first glance, V. Vishnevsky builds his one-line poem on the effect of surprise and nothing more, but nevertheless a new literary fact arises from such a combination of the incongruous, a combination of multi-level aesthetic constructions, such a change in context sharpens the poetic statement or generally gives it a new meaning, travesty, parodic, ironically reduced, comic, but in no way in relation to Pushkin. Pushkin's poem has nothing to do with such a new result of the work of a modern poet. Pushkin is Pushkin, and Vishnevsky is Vishnevsky. And they will not leave their place. These are signs of the cultural universe, but they are not even located on different levels, but in different niches.

Vsevolod Nekrasov uses the same technique when solving his original artistic problem:

I remember a wonderful moment Neva sovereign current I love you Petra creation Who wrote the poem I wrote a poem.

“The poet lives in non-Euclidean space, and there he really wrote any poem.”

This series of “borrowings” can be continued indefinitely, but should be perceived not as literary fun, entertainment or shocking, but as a fundamental level phenomenon that can only be understood by answering the questions: what is the purpose of such “exercises” with someone else’s text, at what levels do postmodernists work with the literary tradition, what are the ways and techniques of using secondary literary material. All this will ultimately make it possible to clarify the typological picture of postmodernism, to classify not only similar phenomena, but also contrasting trends, oppositional to each other.

I. Severin’s reflections on the principles of organizing poetics by postmodernists, which are reminiscent of building a house from the wreckage of a sunken ship, are worthy of attention. There was a storm, the ship was wrecked, and it was washed ashore. Without tools, without craft skills, that is, without consciously denied literary experience, the author, like a new Robinson, begins to pile up a monstrous structure from what is at hand. The door becomes a window, the galley porthole becomes a toilet, the ship's flag becomes a towel. The researcher identifies the main features of postmodernism: destruction of someone else's text, construction from someone else's material, use of things for other purposes.

The easiest way to explain a destructive attitude towards someone else’s work is that the authors are unable to create their own due to a lack of basic skill, literary experience, taste, and culture. Understanding and recognition of this does not explain the nature of postmodernism, since with all the reproaches of derivativeness, epigonism, imitation, ironic-reduced subtext, parody-travesty attitude towards the classical tradition, their work contains aesthetic potential, which is due not only to the unexpected effect of combining the incongruous.

D. Prigov, forming the consciousness of his hero in exact conceptual accordance with the poetics of a graphomaniac, organizes the text in such a way that through a set of banalities, hackneyed cliches, fragments of a destroyed genre, his own meaning shines through: admiration for life, longing for the unrealized harmony of man and history, past and present , an attempt to restore the genetic memory lost by a generation:

The edge of an ear, the grain of an eye, Ripped open by the oral cavity Life rises with the rose of Shiraz, Stunning in the morning. ....................................... There is no water in our veins at all, It’s not blood at all, at least it looks like it, Like pterodactyl bird things, Ancient Terry is in our veins.

Prigovskaya Terry turns out to be a kind of plasma substance that takes on bizarre shapes: a beast, a beauty, a tyrant, and a monster, bad thoughts and beauty, evil and good:

Gently singing, thickly pinching, Tearing meat into rags, Here it is, real life, In the name of God - Terry All Rus'.

And the essence, and the phenomenon, and the idea, and faith, and the memory of ancestors, the instinct of the race, the object and the subject, historical and social constants - everything fits into this image, which has a plurality of references. Traditional images and cliches are being destroyed. The poet’s thinking is paradoxical and aphoristic; the author’s artistic consciousness has its own laws, its own logic. An antitext with antisense is created.

According to L. Losev, postmodernists (avant-gardists) are those who do not know how to write interestingly. Realizing that no amount of manifestos and theorizing can make a reader who is bored believe that he is interested, they resort to tricks. Those who are simpler flavor their writings with exhibitionism and other violations of the prohibitions imposed by civilization. Those who are more well-read and thoughtful stretch their own prose onto the frame of an ancient myth or turn the plot into a puzzle. The hope here is that the reader will be captivated by recognizing a familiar myth in unfamiliar clothing and solving a puzzle.

If we consider that the function of literature is reduced to a fictional task, then we can agree with this, if we understand that literature is something higher than entertainment and relaxation from the works of the righteous, and the perception of art requires a huge amount of work, including intellectual, then postmodernist experiments with the frame of myth, traditional plot, literary image justified if only because they once again make you think.

V. Pelevin in the story “Prince from the State Planning Committee” creates a parody of computer games, where he analyzes the destructive impact on human consciousness of the techniques of clichés, programming, and intellectual zombies.

Achieving the highest level in the game is identical to the highest level of one’s spiritual fulfillment, to which a person can rise in search of truth, in realizing his dreams. In a reminiscent sense, the theme of the Labyrinth with all the mythological paraphernalia (Minotaur, Theseus, Ariadne) appears in the story. Echoes of the myth materialize in the images of whimsical heroes inhabiting the computer world: dragons, guards, monsters, beauties. The mythological meaning is in the problem itself: a person must expend incredible efforts to achieve his goal, but it turns out to be false, illusory. The computer search problem has been solved: the princess has been freed, but the hero has not achieved the truth in his spiritual flight - the princess turned out to be a stuffed animal with a pumpkin head. The usual categories: goal-means, dream-reality, illusion-reality, feat-vegetation in insignificance, etc. are not applicable to a situation that is constructed using mythological motifs and images. The original meaning is destroyed by one phrase: “It’s just that when a person spends so much time and effort on the road and finally gets there, he can no longer see everything as it really is. Although this is also not accurate. There’s really no business at all.” The meaning escapes, since the goal itself turned out to be an aberration of vision. Transformation of traditional literary motives allowed the writer to solve original artistic problems in the stories “Ukhryab”, “The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna”, “The Werewolf Problem in the Middle Zone”, “Weapons of Retribution”, etc.

“Condemnation to tradition” (O. Vanshtein’s expression), forced repetition of the known, self-expression through the destruction of the other (alien) are aspects of intertextuality, which characterizes postmodernism as an aesthetic system. Intertextuality in V. Pelevin is manifested through a special, unusual saturation of the text with allusions, references, hints, “endless recoding of meanings along an open semiotic chain.” The semantic field of symbols and images changes, is corrected, the symbolic semantics of a transmythological situation, conflict, plot is “turned” inside out, “re-faced”.

In the story “The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna”, on an unconscious level, perhaps, in addition to the will of the author, quite definite associations arise in the reader’s perception, creating the effect of recognizing well-known phenomena and facts. Reality, historical process, human existence is depicted in such a monstrously distorted form that one can only assume and guess about the reasons that led the world and man to such a result. What was the cause if the effect is so terrible? Vera Pavlovna, an intelligent cleaner in a men's public toilet, which turned first into a cooperative toilet with flowers and fountains, then into a cooperative store, on the shelves of which French eau de toilette in elegant bottles suggested quite understandable associations about its true content, has an inner vision that allows her to discover the true essence of things; The heroine's friend Manyasha, an old woman with a gray braid at the back of her head, resembles the expression "Dostoevsky's Petersburg." The author notes that the girlfriends often exchanged copies of Blavatsky and Ramacharaka and went to see Fassbinder at Illusion. All details, signs of life, characteristics of the psychological state of the characters evoke in the reader’s mind memories of what is well known in literary, historical, and socio-political terms. But the very idea, the pathos, contained, for example, in the novel by N. G. Chernyshevsky “What is to be done,” the motif of dreams about liberation from the basement, about real and fantastic dirt, about a bright future, which ultimately turns into an existence in a cooperative toilet, unfolds in V. Pelevin’s concepts are a profanation of the high, a debunking of the ideal. Pelevin transforms Chernyshevsky’s “real and fantastic” dirt into apocalyptic dirt, into the ninth wave of fetid sewage, which breaks through the thin shell of civilization and sweeps away everything in its path. The story carries a dystopian meaning: “we dreamed of beautiful wonderful world made of light aluminum structures, but ended up in the trash heap” (Yu. Nagibin). V. Pelevin does not set out to investigate the causes of the disaster; he only shows the disastrous result. It is not difficult to guess what happened in the history of the country, in the fate of the people, in the concrete existence of man in the interval between the fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna Rozalskaya and the ninth dream of modern Vera Pavlovna.

The technique of artistic “curvature of space and time” is used by the author at all levels; the purpose of this technique is to show how life itself has been distorted under the influence of false attitudes and slogans to the level of caricature. (In the cooperative toilet, natural functions were performed to the music of “Mass” and “Requiem” by Verdi and “Ride of the Valkyries” by Wagner, and “the Valkyries looked at the tiled walls and cement floor with great bewilderment”).

Nevertheless, the writer does not exaggerate, exaggerate or distort anything, he only returns words and concepts to their original meaning, discovers the true essence in phenomena, removes the textbook gloss not only from a classic literary work, but also with his “ninth wave” washes away the husks of ideas , calls, spells, slogans about universal happiness, which for our tragic history turned into the grin of many dictatorships, and then the tragic history degenerated into a farce.

Such active assimilation of previous literary experience is justified and natural, if it does not turn into simply a game with meanings, and does not have the character of pure imitation or stylization.

For example, A. Iljanen in the text “And the Finn” also actively uses someone else’s word, but this does not always carry a special or new semantic load and allows for a broad interpretation.

The genre is explicitly or covertly focused on Rozanov’s “notes on the sole” from “Fallen Leaves”: “Written on a stump in a picturesque place where there is a river, dachas, pine trees.” The subject of reflection is extremely vague, indefinite - history, literature, language, culture, philosophy, “and something and a foggy distance.”

The text itself is a two-level narrative - mythology and modernity. The names of de Sade, Van Gogh, Pushkin, Rozanov, Spinoza, Proust, Wilde, Gumilyov, Kuzmin and others suggest reliance on the cultural and intellectual potential of the recipient of the text. The hero is an all-man who has completely lost his individual traits, soars freely in the flight of his thoughts, moves freely in time and space without boundaries. The image of an “ivory tower”, in which, as the classic put it, “closer to the sky, you can’t hear idiots there,” is transformed into a train carriage: “My carriage is my writer’s tower.” The complete confusion of languages ​​should emphasize this pan-humanity: sorry (English), stysi (Italian), Wo bist du mientoibhen (German), amplificator (Spanish).

And everything is accompanied by the Latin et cetera.

But these cultural values, signs, oriented towards the intellectual work of the reader, exist on their own and are not magnetized by “meanings”. Ideas about the finitude of life, matter, movement, forms of existence of culture, human civilization come down to the idea of ​​​​the need for communication through the word as the fundamental principle of life - “until your body lies with your stomach cut open on the table in the autopsy room.” It has long been said that “in the beginning was the Word.” The writer's intention in this case turns out to be greater than its implementation.

A. Kondratiev’s novel “Hello, Hell!” is also noteworthy in this regard. The text of the novel is also focused on the reader’s “recognition” of familiar images, characters, situations, and texts.

Sartre’s famous paradoxical phrase “Hell is others” is rethought and artistically transformed by the author on a global philosophical and historical level.

“After all, hell was one, all-encompassing, it embraced the entire planet, all deeds and hopes, the entire human race. For hell is a man."

The description of hell in the city of Kotlograd, in the rotting hearts of its inhabitants, in phantasmagoric pictures inscribed in a concrete realistic outline, which is extremely brutal in nature, is intended to cause a catharsis effect, to bring reason to the careless humanity mired in sin.

The plot of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is transliterated: the author himself leads the reader through the nine circles of the world-hell, identifying himself with the new Lucifer.

Excerpts of texts from F. M. Dostoevsky, thoughts of A. Platonov, philosophical views of N. Fedorov, combined with Henry Miller episodes at the level of brutal prayers to the Lord, who the author “is in his pants,” form an excessive, oversaturated structure in which The author's own thoughts get stuck.

Sentences like: “The Last Judgment is just around the corner, but it is not terrible compared to the hell that a naive reader calls normal life” are quite banal.

“The banners of Hell were approaching” - this is how the novel, which claims to be a new “Revelations of John the Theologian,” ends pathetically.

The current state of the literary process is characterized by a certain cooling of interest in postmodern, avant-garde experiments. As a consequence of this cooling or general denial and rejection, numerous parodies (“revealing doubles”) arise in poetry and prose of the texts of postmodernists. Such a mockery of postmodern culture and aesthetics was, for example, the novel-epigram by Yu. Polyakov “Little Goat in Milk.”

Everything in it, starting with the key phrase, outwardly monstrous, but essentially meaningless: “Don’t boil a kid in your own mother’s milk” - to the plot, conflict, heroes, in the most deliberately retrospective-reminiscent structure of the text, saturated with the signs of the postmodern paradigm, is subordinated to one Goals: prove that the king is naked.

One of the heroes of the novel, the writer Churmenyaev, created the novel “Woman in a Chair,” where a lady, “stretched out in a gynecological chair, tries to find God within herself.” This idea arose from Churmenyaev when he imagined Nastasya Filippovna in a gynecological chair. This very collision is an attack on the emphasized anti-aestheticism of postmodern culture. The writer thus parodies the trend of vulgar modernization of the classics.

In the fundamental aesthetic thesis of the homosexual literary theorist Lyubin-Lyubchenko: “What is the text, so is the context” - the imaginary significance, from the point of view of Yu. Polyakov, of the post-structuralist and deconstructivist method is visible.

The subject of parody also becomes modern conceptual (“contextual”, in the writer’s words) poetry, poetic exercises in the style of V. Vishnevsky: “How the Prophetic Oleg is now getting ready // To a busty Khazar woman for a riotous night.”

The attack on conceptualists and metaphorists like L. Rubinstein, D. Prigov, A. Eremenko and others is very sharp: “Encouraged, I began to give out various epigrams and other rhyming nonsense that any writers indulge in in their simple everyday life, and only some scoundrels pass them off as masterpieces of contextual poetry.”

And finally, the very revealing pathos of Yu. Polyakov’s novel is directed against the fundamental thought of writers of the postmodern era about the end of literature: “The sign of a blank sheet is a sign of the end of literature... even the most innocent sign drawn on paper forever closes the very exit to the information field of the Universe,” therefore the entire plot of the novel revolves around the extraordinary, brilliant creation of the young author, which in the end turns out to be just a stack of blank sheets in a paper folder with neat laces.

All this revealing pathos aimed at revealing the imaginary significance, artificiality, and secondary nature of postmodern culture could be understood and accepted if the writer himself had not embroidered the pattern of his novel along the canvas of traditional literature.

In the novel there are constant references to M. Bulgakov: mention is made of the skill of M. Bulgakov, who brilliantly depicted the clinical picture of a hangover syndrome; the satirical picture in the Central House of Writers in an allusive way corresponds with the corresponding incident in the Griboedov House, which turns out to be necessary for the writer to conclude about the crisis state of the post Soviet literature.

Dostoevsky's tracing paper becomes the episode of throwing a folder into the fireplace, in which instead of a manuscript there is a stack of blank sheets; The collision itself: Nastasya Filippovna - Rogozhin - Ganechka Ivolgin - Prince Myshkin, which is transformed at an ironically reduced level, is of a comic nature. The role of the frenzied and passionate Nastasya Filippovna is played by a fantastic woman, Anka, the daughter of a literary general, an eccentric person who has become a bargaining chip, a kind of challenge pennant (“This Nastasija Filippovna... really”).

The performance of a classical tragedy in a new setting emphasizes the motive of inauthenticity, ersatz, imitation, vulgarization of the high, just as “Napoleon cognac” produced at the Krakow chemical plant, in the concept of Yu. Polyakov, turns out to be a kind of metaphor for postmodernism.

As already written above, the concept of postmodernism is quite arbitrary. There is still no exact theoretical definition or designation of the spheres of its distribution, since in contemporary art there are no boundaries, it is characterized by general transgression. Postmodern thinking is not distinguished by any formal characteristics; it can express itself not only at the level of worldview, belief system, aesthetic principles, ethical coordinates, but also at the level of unconscious sensations and moods. In this regard, the evolution of the work of V. Makanin, who is in no way classified as an obvious, “pure” postmodernist, is indicative, whose work has always been mainly of a realistic nature, although artistic convention played a special role in it, there were symbols, signs, metaphors, special “Makanin mood”.

The story "Prisoner of the Caucasus", which fits into big picture the writer’s creativity, nevertheless occupies a special place, becoming an unusual phenomenon both in its content and in the way of solving problems in the system of Makanin’s “whims”.

The story was written in June-September 1994. This is important for understanding both the real historical situation and in an artistic context: large-scale actions by federal troops in Chechnya have not yet been carried out (they began in November-December), but the future tragedy has already been predicted, foreseen.

The title of the story is reminiscent of the works of the same name by A. S. Pushkin and L. N. Tolstoy. Pushkin’s poem contains all the attributes of the romantic genre: a mysterious landscape, a nameless hero, fatal circumstances, love with a tragic outcome, etc. The genre definition of “truth” in L. N. Tolstoy’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” determines a different intonation of the narrative: “He served in In the Caucasus, one gentleman is an officer. His name was Zhilin.” In the story, everyday details of captivity are important: “two stinking Tatars are sitting on it,” stocks, a pit, instead of food, “unbaked dough that only feeds dogs.” The meaning of the work is in the contrast of characters: strong and weak.

Makanin’s story combines both of these principles: a romantic conflict with a fatal outcome is realized by means of “fierce realism.” Such genre mixing is typical for writers of postmodern orientation.

The title of the story becomes a kind of hoax; the expectation of the type of plot imposed by this name is not justified (there is not even a hint of a remake like the film “Prisoner of the Caucasus”). The title of the story indicates the provocative nature of the modern writer’s appeal to the tradition of Russian classics, therefore all the imposed associations turn out to be false, the plot develops according to the anti-scheme of Pushkin’s poem, Lermontov’s poems of the Caucasian cycle (“Mtsyri”), the story of L. N. Tolstoy, since the formulation of the problem itself is non-standard and unexpected, unpredictable plot twists.

The very concept of “captive” turns out to be polysemantic and is extrapolated to both private and general phenomena. In a narrow sense, this is a young militant taken prisoner by federal troops for the purpose of exchanging “prisoners for prisoners,” and the Russian soldier Rubakhin, who was captured by his feelings. In a broad sense - the Chechens, who became hostages of the political scam of the next “little Napoleon,” and the Russian people, who turned out to be a kind of victim of geopolitical interests and the idea of ​​territorial integrity. Captivity in metaphorical terms is defined by the writer as blindness of mind, undeveloped consciousness, sleeping soul, unawakened heart, captivity human misconceptions and prejudice becomes the cause of war.

The meaning of the story is manifested in the clash of oppositional principles (binary oppositions): peace-war, Russia-Caucasus, plain-mountains, beauty of nature-ugliness of death, unity-disunity, love-hate, etc.

The plot is constructed in accordance with Tolstoy's principle of contrast. The story begins with literary phrase(from Dostoevsky) that “beauty will save the world,” which is highlighted in petit and naturalistic detailed description death of Corporal Boyarkov: “The militants shot the sleeping man. Face without a single scratch. And the ants crawled. In the first minute, Rubakhin and Vovka began dropping ants. When they turned him over, there was a hole in Boyarkov’s back. They shot at point-blank range, but the bullets did not have time to disperse and hit in a heap: having broken the ribs, the bullets carried out his entire insides - on the ground (in the ground) lay crumbs of ribs, on them was the liver, kidneys, circles of intestines, all in a large, cold pool of blood. Boyarkov lay upside down, with a huge hole in his back. And his insides, along with the bullets, lay in the ground.” An extremely naturalistic description, suggestive of an autopsy table in an anatomical theatre, emphasized anti-aestheticism, a clear reluctance to take into account or at least spare the reader’s feelings indicate an imbalance in the relationship of aesthetic categories, the absence of a norm, the deliberate destruction of beauty, the expediency of artistic forms.

The redundancy of the very word “beauty” in the text becomes a symbol of the futility of efforts to maintain harmony: “Among the mountains, they felt beauty too well. She was frightening”, “the beauty of the place amazed me”, “beauty is constant in its attempt to save. She calls out to the person in his memory. She will remind you."

In the text of the story there are constant “transparent traces” from Russian classics.

As often in Tolstoy, in V. Makanin’s story there is no direct description of military actions; the war is given indirectly (“the ugly consequences of war”).

The war is depicted in an ordinary and brutalized way. Its goals are vague and false (“sluggish option”). The operation to disarm the militants (“since Yermolov’s times it was called a horseshoe”) evokes Tolstoy’s “man hunt.”

Soldiers trade for port wine in a village store, Vovka the shooter is looking for simple carnal pleasures, Colonel Gurov bargains with the field commander who locked his food trucks in a gorge and exchanges them for guns and grenades; as if by chance, mention is made of soldiers who raped a woman. The everydayness and coarsening in the depiction of war emphasize its meaninglessness and endless horror. The world, which is in a state of war, is plunged into chaos, where all the usual ideas collapse.

The gaming principle used by the writer enhances the drama of the conflict. War, as depicted by V. Makanin, is perceived as “not real,” unreal, a toy, as people’s entertainment or a first test of strength. All the more insurmountable is the gulf of misunderstanding, alienation and hatred between the participants in the drama. The tragic outcome is predetermined at the beginning of the story.

Vovka the shooter in his sight sees all the Chechens fortified on the opposite slope, holds them at gunpoint and amuses himself with the fact that with a well-aimed shot he will break a mirror in the hands of a militant trimming his beard, or he will break a Chinese thermos, and then the forest will be filled with alien and incomprehensible guttural exclamations : illal-killal. The sniper soldier sees all the buttons on the highlanders’ uniform and is already taking aim at live targets. The order to shoot has not yet been given - but there are already enemies in the crosshairs of his sniper rifle, the confrontation is indicated: so much mutual hatred has accumulated that all that remains is to bring a match.

The concept of peace turns out to be relative; the world is already charged with war. Its reason is not in the conflict between savagery and civilization, ignorance and culture, but in the clash of people with different mentalities, bearers of faith, tradition, culture, each of which is self-sufficient (cf. the episode with Hadji Murad at Count Vorontsov’s ball (“Hadji Murad "L.N. Tolstoy).

At the end of the story, a new meaning for the title itself emerges. Why prisoner and not prisoner? Captive - deprived of will, prisoner, prisoner, slave, which implies an alternative: release from captivity. In V. Makanin’s concept of “captive” this alternative is absent. A prisoner is not just an indefinite state of the hero, but a constant one. The only way out of Makanin’s “captivity” can be death.

The hero of the story, Rubakhin, remains forever captive to the mountains, the beauty of which he perceives instinctively, at a deep genetic level, while at the external level of consciousness, as a native of the steppes, he hates them: “And what’s so special here! Mountains?... he said out loud with anger not at anyone, but at himself. What is interesting in a cold soldier's barracks - and what is interesting in the mountains themselves? - he thought with annoyance. He wanted to add: they say, what a year! And instead he said: “For what century now...” - as if he had let it slip, the words jumped out of the shadows, and the surprised soldier thought out this quiet thought that had lain in the depths of his consciousness.

Black mossy gorges. Poor, dirty houses of the mountaineers, stuck together like birds' nests. But still mountains! Here and there their peaks, yellow from the sun, are crowded together. Mountains. Mountains. Mountains. For years their majesty and silent solemnity have been stirring in his heart - but what, in fact, did their beauty want to tell him? Why did you call out?”

Makanin has always been interested in human relationships, deep, often elusive, sometimes mystical, not expressed materially, really subtle connections that exist between people (stories in the collection “The Laggard”: “Klyucharyov and Alimushkin”, “Anti-Leader”, etc.).

The transition from the beauty of nature to the beauty of man is accomplished through an explosion of sensuality, which is revealed in Rubakhin’s strange, non-standard, incomprehensible at the external level of consciousness perception of the beauty of a captive young militant (a certain modern version of Mtsyri). This beauty struck Rubakhin to the very heart: “Long, shoulder-length dark hair. Subtle facial features. Soft skin. Fold of lips. Brown eyes forced to linger on them - large winged and slightly askew”, “the amazing beauty of a motionless gaze”, “feeling his beauty was as natural to him as breathing air.”

A certain clarity in this non-standard situation is brought by the remark of soldier Khodzhaev: “You trade two, three, or five people for something like that. They love people like that, like a girl.” - Rubakhin chuckled. He suddenly realized what bothered him about the captured militant - the young man was very handsome.”

Beauty, in the concept of V. Makanin, can become the force that can transform the world, destroy all barriers: national, socio-political, racial-biological, cultural, ethical, religious; only she is able to unite people, stop the war of all against all, and save the world from the horror of mutual destruction.

The feeling that Rubakhin feels for the young man (what is now designated as a non-standard sexual orientation) is not qualified by the writer as a “homosexual call of the flesh.” The contact between the characters is indicated very subtly, organically, as hope for the possibility of understanding, which the human community is deprived of at all levels, the elimination of the main evil, as L. Tolstoy wrote, the disunity of people. Rubakhin's courtship of the captive young man is touching and tender: he gave him his woolen socks (since he had previously broken his leg with the butt of a machine gun when he could not reach the escaping man in a throw); “brewed tea in a glass, threw in sugar, stirred with a spoon” (and this to the enemy, barely cooling down from the heat of the fleeting battle).

In designating the psychological state of the hero, who himself does not understand what is happening to him: “a current of pliable and inviting warmth”, “a current of sensuality”, “a charge of warmth and unexpected tenderness”, “worried”, “embarrassed by the emerging relationship”, etc. .; the vocabulary itself: current, charge, sensuality - designate such relationships, connections, contacts that are not subject to rational analysis, this is something coming from the depths of human consciousness, conditioned by its internal nature, something that does not depend on the will of a person, on his mind, intelligence, social orientations, nationality, views, beliefs and everything that is determined by external factors. A person finds himself alone with his instincts; he acts as a biological being with a whimsical, complex, contradictory nature. The concepts of sin, ethical norms, social standards - all this is destroyed in front of the inner call and instinctive need to fulfill one’s tenderness, the need to love.

But this moment of understanding (read love) is destroyed, destroyed when Rubakhin strangled the prisoner, who with his cry could have given away their location during the combat operation: “... N-we,” the captive young man wanted to say something, but did not have time. His body jerked, his legs tensed, but there was no longer any support under his feet. Rubakhin tore him off the ground, held him in his arms, and did not allow his feet to touch any sensitive bushes or stones that would roll with noise. With the hand that was hugging, Rubakhin blocked his throat. He squeezed: beauty did not have time to save. A few convulsions - that’s all.” Instead of a loving embrace, there is an embrace of death. And as a result of the destruction of this harmony, a subsequent national and human catastrophe that goes beyond the scope of the story.

What remains in the soul of a Russian person who has come into contact with the beauty, mystery, mystery of the Caucasus, someone else's life, customs, traditions, everything that makes up the culture of the nation as a whole, and the specific mystery of someone else's soul? Surprise, annoyance, anger, irritation, confusion in thoughts, embarrassment, lack of understanding of what happened. Like an angry child breaks beautiful toy, so Rubakhin kills, destroys beauty that cannot belong to him, cannot be understood by him due to the underdevelopment of his consciousness, soul.

Makaninsky’s story “Caucasian Prisoner”, thus, becomes a phenomenon of literature of the transitional time, it indicates the crisis state of the world and the human soul, a way out of the crisis is ideally possible, but in reality it is impossible.

Thus, literature of a postmodernist sound, relying on the existing literary tradition, the creative experience of writers of previous stages of cultural development, nevertheless creates a self-sufficient artistic reality.

CONCLUSION

M. Lipovetsky, emphasizing the global claims of Russian postmodernism for ideological and artistic dominance, writes that postmodernism does not pretend to be another movement in a pluralistic landscape, but insists on its dominance in the entire culture.

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APPLICATIONS

Annex 1

Glossary of terms

Axiology is the science of values, a system of values.

Anthropology is the philosophy of man, highlighting as a subject the sphere of human existence itself, the actual nature of man, human individuality.

Appropriation - borrowing, appropriation; an operation reverse to the process of reproduction (reproduction).

Ambivalence - ambiguity, double meaning.

Authenticity - authenticity, truthfulness, reliability.

Bricolage is a technique that allows one to bypass contradictions, a philological “evasion”.

Valorization is the aestheticization of the profane, spiritualization, giving high meaning to the low, rough, and vulgar.

Diffusion - mixing.

Deconstruction is a critique of the metaphysical way of thinking. The term was proposed by J. Derrida as a translation of “Destruktion” by M. Heidegger. Combines the negative and destructive “de” with the “con” emphasizing continuity and continuity. The method is based on the principle of extracting associations caused by an object, relying on the mechanism of the unconscious.

Discourse is a concept put forward by structuralists to analyze the social conditioning of a speech utterance; a combination by which the speaker uses a language code. Often used as a synonym for speech. According to M. Foucault’s definition, “socially determined organization of the system of speech and action.”

Intertextuality is a characteristic that determines textual heterogeneity, the polyphonic structure of a text (M. Bakhtin); literally means the inclusion of one text into another, “the interweaving of texts and codes, the transformation of other texts” (Y. Kristeva). The main signs of intertextuality are blurred boundaries, lack of completeness, closedness, internal heterogeneity, and multiplicity of text.

Intention - intention, goal.

Immoralism is immorality.

Insight - insight, inspiration, breakthrough.

Implicit - hidden, without direct or figurative nomination.

Constitution - formation.

Correlative - correlated, correlated.

Marginal - excluded from the general series, not conforming to accepted norms and values, breaking out of the system.

Metaphysics is the philosophical doctrine of general principles, forms and qualities abstracted from the concrete existence of things and people; characterization of the structures of being and thinking outside of their development, self-movement, mutual transitions; a generalized picture of the world order.

Narrative - story, narration.

Obscene vocabulary is obscene, taboo, outside the norms of the literary language.

Ontology is the doctrine of being, the principles of its structure, laws and forms.

Profane - profane, vulgar, low, rude.

Relativism is relativity, non-conditionality.

Ready-made is a trend in art that focuses on the use of “ready-made things”, in accordance with the aesthetics of which any object is “ready for use” in the field of art.

Reflection - introspection, self-control.

Subculture is a substitute for culture, an ersatz, an imitation, located at a lower level in the value system in terms of its aesthetic characteristics.

Simplicit - simplified.

Suggestive - oriented, aimed at suggestion, capable of suggesting.

Simulacrum (simulacrum, simulacrum) - similarity, “copy of a copy”, reflection of reflection, assimilation of assimilation, claiming to designate the original, true, authentic; appearance without substance.

Transgression - transition, disruption.

Escapism - avoidance of problems, escape, solitude, alienation.

Eschatology is the doctrine of the finitude of the world.

Appendix 2

Topics of reports for presentation at a special seminar

1. Compromise as a principle of attitude towards reality in the works of S. Dovlatov.

2. Laughter as a genre-building and formative element in the prose of S. Dovlatov.

3. Anti-ideal hero in the stories of S. Dovlatov.

4. Tolstoyan traditions in V. Makanin’s story “Prisoner of the Caucasus.”

5. Traditions of Russian classics in V. Voinovich’s novel “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of the Soldier Ivan Chonkin.”

6. The combination of classical and postmodern traditions in V. Pietsukh’s novel “New Moscow Philosophy.”

7. Literary reminiscences in the stories of V. Pietsukh “Ward No. 7”, “Central Ermolaevskaya War”, “Child of the State”, etc.

8. History and modernity in the novel by V. Pietsukh “The Enchanted Country.”

9. The nature of the conflict in the prose of A. Borodynia (“Corporate Portrait by Malevich,” “Mother and Fresh Milk,” “Funk-Eliot”).

10. The eschatological nature of F. Gorenstein’s prose (“Redemption”, “Last Summer on the Volga”, etc.).

11. The profane and the ideal in the stories of V. Erofeev (“Life with an Idiot”, “White castrated cat with the eyes of a beauty”, etc.).

12. Features of postmodernism in the text by Y. Kisina “The Flight of the Dove over the Mud of Phobia.”

13. Genre transgression in the work of M. Kuraev (“Mirror of Montachka: Crime Suite in 23 parts, with introduction and theorem about ghosts”).

14. “Subcultural” beginning in A. Korolev’s novel “Eron”.

15. The motif of “madness” as a protection from reality in the prose of postmodernism (N. Sadur, V. Sharov, E. Sadur, Yu. Aleshkovsky, etc.).

16. “Witch’s Tears” N. Sadur in line with postmodern aesthetics.

17. The genre of “anti-confession” in the prose of E. Limonov (“It’s me - Eddie!”, “Teenager Savenko”, “Young scoundrel”, “Executioner”).

18. “Own” and “alien” in the texts of V. Sorokin (“Queue”, “Meeting of the Factory Committee”, “A Month in Dachau”, “Marina’s Thirtieth Love”, etc.).

19. The role of artistic convention, fantasy in the work of V. Pelevin (stories from the collection “The Blue Lantern”).

20. “Simulacrized reality” in the prose of V. Pelevin (“Crystal World”, “Chapaev and Emptiness”, etc.).

21. Forms of appropriation in the poetry of D. Prigov (“The appearance of verse after his death”, “Terry of all Rus'”).

22. Centenity as the main principle of creativity by T. Kibirov, V. Nekrasov, A. Eremenko, V. Vishnevsky and others.

23. The artistic originality of Yu. Mamleev’s prose (“The Notebook of an Individualist”, “The Wrong Relationship”, “The Hanged Man”, “The Wrong Side of Gauguin”, etc.).

24. Transformation of the genre of literary parody in postmodern literature (M. Weller, A. Kabakov, Y. Polyakov, V. Sorokin, etc.)

25. Shocking and escapade in I. Yarkevich’s trilogy “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”.

26. The problem of stylization in postmodern literature (A. Sinyavsky, V. Sorokin, V. Pietsukh).

27. The ironic principle in the prose and poetry of postmodernism (V. Pietsukh, E. Popov, L. Rubinstein, etc.).

28. Valeria Narbikova and the traditions of erotic literature (“Visibility of us”, “Balance of the light of day and night stars”, “About ecology”).

29. Genre diversity of L. Petrushevskaya’s creativity.

30. “Linguistic fairy tales” by L. Petrushevskaya. Problems of tradition and innovation.

Links

See: Genis A. Tower of Babel. M.: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1997. P. 97.

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See: Groys B. Utopia and exchange. M.: Znak, 1993. P. 143, 159–162. 12

Quote from: Groys B. Utopia and exchange. M.: Znak, 1993. P. 161.

See: Vanshtein O. Meet: Homo deconstruktivus. Philosophical games of postmodernism // Apocrypha. - M.: Labyrinth, 1996. No. 2. P. 12–29.

Quote by: Guzeev V.V. System bases of educational technology. M.: Znanie, 1995. P. 19.

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See also there. P.24.

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Pelevin V. Blue Lantern. M.: Text, 1992.

Pelevin V. Blue Lantern. M.: Text, 1992. P. 96.

Pelevin V. Chapaev and Emptiness. M.: Vagrius, 1997.

Quote by: Biryukov S. Zeugma: Russian poetry from mannerism to postmodernism. M.: Nauka, 1994. P. 108.

Barnes J. History of the world in 10 ½ chapters // Foreign lit. 1994. No. 1.

See: Genis A. From the dead end // Ogonyok. 1990. No. 5. P. 18.

Turchin A. In the labyrinths of the avant-garde. M., 1993. P. 203.

See: Genis A, Tower of Babel. M.: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1997. P. 105.

Sorokin V. Factory Committee Meeting // Russian Flowers of Evil. M.: Podkova, 1997. P.377-378.

Zimovets S. Silence of Gerasim. M.: Gnosis, 1996. pp. 112–113.

See: Groys B. Utopia and exchange. M.: Znak, 1993. P. 226.

Kuritsyn Vyach. On the threshold of energy culture // Lit. gas. 1990. No. 44. S. 4.

Genis A. From the dead end // Ogonyok. 1990. No. 52. P. 16.

See: Severin I. New literature of the 70-80s. // West. new lit. 1991. No. 1. P. 224.

See: Collection. historical jokes. St. Petersburg 1869. P. 155.

Vanshtein O. Homo deconstructivus: Philosophical games of postmodernism // Apocrypha. 1996. No. 2. P. 23.

See: Genis A. Tower of Babel. M.: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1997. pp. 51–52.

Sorokin V. Norma. M., 1994.

See: Biryukov S. Zeugma: Russian poetry from mannerism to postmodernism. M.: Nauka, 1994. P. 183.

Erskine F. Ross and I // Vest. new lit. 1991. No. 1.

Coleridge S. T. Definition of poetry // Izbr. tr. M.: Art, 1987. P. 221.

Biryukov S. Zeugma. Russian poetry from mannerism to postmodernism. M.: Nauka, 1994. P. 183.

Severin I. New literature of the 70-80s. // West. new lit. 1991. No. 1. P.222.

Prigov D. A. Terry of all Rus' // Vest. new lit. 1991. No. 1. P. 96.

See: Losev L. Preface // Dovlatov S. Collection. cit.: In 3 vols. M., St. Petersburg: Limbus-Press, 1995. P. 366.

Pelevin V. Blue Lantern. M.: Text, 1991. P. 102.

Pelevin V. Blue Lantern. M.: Text, 1991. P. 140.

Ilyanen A. And the Finn // Mitin magazine. 1996.

Kondratyev A. Hello, hell! // New lit. review. 1996. No. 18.

See: Polyakov Yu. Baby goat in milk // Smena. 1995. No. 11-12.

Polyakov Yu. Baby goat in milk // Smena. 1995. No. 11. P. 111.

Right there. P. 98.

Polyakov Yu. Baby goat in milk // Smena. 1995. No. 11. P. 75.

Right there. pp. 60-61.

Makanin V. Prisoner of the Caucasus // New World. 1995. No. 4.

Makanin V. Prisoner of the Caucasus // New World. 1995. No. 4. P. 11.

Makanin V. Prisoner of the Caucasus // New World. 1995. No. 4. P. 19.

Right there. P. 15.

Right there. P. 16.

Makanin V. Prisoner of the Caucasus // New World. 1995. No. 4. P. 17.

Lipovetsky M. Specifics of Russian postmodernism // Znamya. 1995. No. 8. P. 193.

Problems of development of modern literature

Literature, as we know, is a special way of understanding existence through an artistic image. The focus of her attention, starting from the most ancient times, is man. And if in painting there are genres where the presence of a person is not required (still life, landscape, animalistic works), then in literature this is almost impossible to achieve. And since man is the central object of attention of a literary work, the development of literature can be considered as development of ways to depict the human personality in a work of art.

One of the main paths of development that world literature found was the path of psychologizing the literary hero. Starting with ancient Greek literature, which greatly influenced the development European literatures, until the end of the nineteenth century, literature found more and more new ways of in-depth depiction of the inner world, the mental and psychological life of a person. For this reason, one of the main problems in the development of literature is character problem. And Russian culture also “moved irresistibly towards a person understood in his historical, social, psychological concreteness.”

In order to understand what we are actually talking about, it is extremely important to remember exactly how the way of depicting human character changed.

So, for example, I.S. Turgenev, a master of historical typification, in the novel “Fathers and Sons,” the main discovery was the character of Yevgeny Vasilyevich Bazarov, which defines the traits of an entire generation. Turgenev creates literary character due to the fact that he grasped the structure of the corresponding historical character, the template of this character. L.Ya wrote about this. Ginzburg in his work “On Psychological Prose”.

The main, defining feature of this character is the principle of staticity. The image of Bazarov appears before the reader as an already established large and integral character.
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What means does Turgenev choose to portray him? This is a portrait, the speech of the hero, his thoughts. At the same time, Bazarov’s character is also revealed in his clashes with other characters in the novel: Bazarov - the Kirsanov brothers, Bazarov - Kukshina, etc.
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That is, the organization of the plot of a novel by the author is a way for him to reveal the character of the hero. In describing the character of Bazarov, Turgenev pursues the goal of giving this static, established character as completely and comprehensively as possible, to describe it from all sides.

Creativity L.N. Tolstoy is distinguished by unprecedented self-analysis. ʼʼTolstoy’s work is the highest point of analytical, explanatory psychologism. For this reason, Tolstoy’s heroes are different. Turgenev builds “unalloyed types”. In Bazarov he sees only a nihilist. And everything in the novel works to fully reveal this nihilism in Bazarov’s character. Tolstoy's heroes are complex. But their main difference from Turgenev’s hero is essentially that the character of Tolstoy’s heroes is dynamic. The character of his heroes lacks the static character that distinguishes Turgenev's heroes. Tolstoy's characters develop. The guess that a person is internally changeable, his character is not something formed and established once and for all, was the artistic discovery of L.N. Tolstoy. This is the discovery of Tolstoy N.G. Chernyshevsky very accurately called it “dialectics of the soul.”

F.M. Dostoevsky made another great discovery in the characterology of the literary hero. Dostoevsky discovered that the inner world of man consists of insoluble contradictions. That is, it contains polar opposite principles, the lightest and the darkest in their complex unity and confrontation. The psychological structure of the human soul in Dostoevsky is so complex that from the brightest motives in the shortest possible time a person can indulge in the darkest dictates of his soul, and vice versa. Almost all of Dostoevsky’s novels are built on this psychological discovery. There are not only positive or only negative heroes: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is both a criminal and a repentant sinner; in him, pride - the Napoleonic ideal, “I have the right” - and humility coexist side by side.

The novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy turned out to be the pinnacle achievements that were potentially contained in the phenomenon called the Russian psychological novel. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky discovered and realized in artistic practice the most important, most profound possibilities of the psychological novel, which was characterized by a keen interest in mental contradictions and the details of the mental process. Thus, basically, the idea of ​​a psychological novel turned out to be exhausted. This exhaustion, as mentioned above, was felt at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and was called the “crisis of the novel genre,” associated with the collapse of humanistic ideology as a whole.

Then there were two possible paths. The first way is the continuation of the tradition of Tolstoy-Dostoevsky. That's how Main way“realistic prose” of the twentieth century. Development of creativity of such artists as A. Kuprin, A. Fadeev, A. Tolstoy, F. Abramov, V. Rasputin, V. Astafiev, A. Solzhenitsyn and others.
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proceeded mainly within the framework of a realistic psychological novel. The problems posed in the works of these writers were different from those in the literature of the 19th century, and the method of creating human character remained basically the same.

Another way is the way of radically rethinking the possibilities of the large form, the novel genre. A.A. Akhmatova once noted that for the development of twentieth-century literature, the work of three European writers turned out to be extremely important: Kafka, Joyce and Proust. The difference between their prose and a psychological novel is that it explores not so much the psychology, the character of the hero, but his consciousness, and consciousness as such, outside the uniqueness of an individual human personality. For this reason, this line of development of the European novel was called the “novel of consciousness”.

It is known that the era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe was marked by an explosion of interest in psychological science and great achievements in it. Here it is enough to name the names of such psychologists as Sigmund Freud, who discovered the sphere of the subconscious in the human psyche, and Carl Gustav Jung, who developed the ideas of his teacher Freud and gave definitions to such concepts as archetype and collective unconscious.

In the 20th century Attempts were made to get rid of psychological generalization. And in Western prose of the twentieth century. there is a process of consistent decrease in character. And if Tolstoy liberated processes, making them the subject of artistic research, then in the twentieth century. they tried to reduce man only to processes. Literature of the 20th century. sought to explore more or less pure processes, processes without humans, ideally pure fluidity. The depiction of characters in psychological prose was now replaced by the depiction of “only states oscillating at the border of consciousness and the subconscious.”

Literature at the end of the 19th century. developed parallel to contemporary psychological science. It was also aimed at discovering the basic laws of the work of the conscious and unconscious in the human psyche. In the short story genre, Kafka as an artist explores the depths of the subconscious in the human psyche. By his own admission, his short stories are just a record of his own dreams, containing no fiction. And sleep, according to Freud and Jung, is a manifestation of the subconscious at the moment when consciousness weakens its control over the unconscious manifestations of the human psyche.

Proust builds his novel “In Search of Lost Time” as a “stream of consciousness”. Proust is not interested in the uniqueness of the human personality, the uniqueness of his qualities, but in the laws of internal speech, which has not yet achieved organized embodiment in words. A technique that postmodernists are extremely fond of using in the modern literary situation.

Joyce, in turn, discovers the associativity of human perception and thinking; his novel “Ulysses” is built on this discovery. The internal monologue of Marion Bloom in Joyce's novel is a gigantic plexus of unpredictable associations, which unfolds over dozens of pages, without a single punctuation mark.

That is, by the beginning of the twentieth century in the European novel there was an active transfer of artistic interest from building the character of a literary hero to the study and reconstruction of the mechanism of the subconscious and cognitive processes. At the same time, as a modern researcher correctly notes, “the titans of early modernism - Joyce, Kafka, Proust - created not only a new literary world, but also a different reader’s consciousness.” In the process of research and reproduction of the structure of consciousness in the artistic works of these writers, a re-creation of the living, real, and not artificially recreated consciousness of literary heroes, the consciousness of contemporaries took place. We can say that these writers, having identified the main structural features of consciousness, became participants in the breakdown of the old, “nineteen” consciousness, and the creators of the new consciousness of man in the twentieth century.

However, this process also has another side. Already naturalism and positivism of the 19th century, and then the psychological discoveries of the 20th century. completely deny the integrity of the human personality. For a bundle of perceptions, a change of sensations, a fractional part of the cycle of nature is not a person. Psychology at the turn of the century abandoned the categories of personality and character. The personality dissolves in a continuously changing stream of mental states.

Russian writers of the early twentieth century sensed the enormous potential inherent in the so-called “novel of consciousness”. For this reason, they also conducted experiments in this direction. This trend can be observed in the works of Andrei Bely: in the story “Kotik Letaev” and in the novel “Petersburg”, in the novel “Little Demon” by F. Sologub, in the story “Childhood Eyelets” by B. Pasternak, etc. This was the way destruction of character. And in the era of the collapse of humanism, it could not be otherwise. Since the human personality in this period loses its own integrity and uniqueness, it breaks up into a number of components: consciousness, subconscious, psyche, gender, etc.

It is possible that on this path of crossing the traditional psychological novel with the new possibilities of the “novel of consciousness,” the main discoveries of Russian literature of the twentieth century awaited. But for objective socio-historical reasons this did not happen. The natural development of the literary process was interrupted and replaced by regulated and controlled literary creativity. For this reason, during the Soviet period of the development of literature of the twentieth century, only that literature was officially recognized that met the requirements of the method of socialist realism. This meant that Soviet literature was largely forced to exist within the framework of inheriting the traditions of the realistic psychological novel of the 19th century. She learned to make good use of those artistic discoveries that were made by the literature of the 19th century.

In the modern literary situation of the 80-90s, writers again turned to the achievements of the “novel of consciousness” and the experiments of Russian modernists. First of all, this applies to those artists who are usually called postmodernists. It is possible, and most likely, that they do not write pure “prose of consciousness,” but combine various elements of all the achievements and discoveries of literature, both realistic and modernist. But there is clearly a tendency to study a person not only and not so much from the side of character, but from the side of his consciousness. And of particular interest to modern literature are any pathological deviations from the average normal consciousness. This is, for example, “School for Fools” by Sasha Sokolov (see the corresponding lecture). Postmodernist prose is also subject to the law of character destruction, which, by its nature, destroys traditional plot structure.

Another important problem of twentieth-century literature is problem of perception. Realistic literature of the 19th century embodied in artistic forms a realistic way of perceiving reality. “To the nineteen-year-old consciousness,” this method seemed the most plausible, capable of most accurately conveying a person in the world around him.

At the same time, throughout its development, art also knew other ways of perceiving reality. For example, myth, from the point of view of a person of the 19th century, conveys reality not realistically, but fantastically, mythologically. From the height of the experience of the 19th century, reality, recreated in myth, was recreated incorrectly, it is fiction, fantasy, a fairy tale. But for the consciousness of the ancient Greek himself, who perceives the myth, it completely corresponds to the reality that ancient man perceives with his senses.

The essence of the problem of perception for literature lies essentially in the fact that over the course of the millennia-long development of human civilization, there have been staged changes in human consciousness, and therefore in the perception of the surrounding reality. For this reason, the perception of reality by the medieval consciousness in the most radical way does not coincide with the perception of reality by a person of the 19th century. The perception of the Russian symbolists of the early twentieth century, for whom existence was revealed in a mystical, symbolic light, categorically did not coincide with the perception of the realists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The symbolists perceived what the realists, who did not have the reception organs to capture the mystical reality, were not able to perceive.

In Soviet literature, it was allowed to perceive the world exclusively realistically, but not symbolically, mystically, surrealistically, fantastically, etc.

Postmodern literature differs from realistic literature, first of all, in the way it perceives reality. In the works of postmodernists, the world is almost unrecognizable. The contours of space change, time flows both forward and backward. The simplest logical laws are not observed: cause-and-effect, unity-multiplicity, uniqueness-universality, etc. All this becomes the reason that the world around us, as depicted by postmodernists, loses its realistic outlines and acquires features of absurdity. Being, organized and developing according to certain laws - physical, chemical, biological, social, historical in postmodern literature, loses these laws and the world returns to its pre-organized, chaotic state.

The problem of conditioning. From the point of view of realistic literature, the image of a person will be described more accurately the more accurately his interactions with the outside world are explained and reproduced. In literary criticism, until recently, the formula was mandatory: “a typical hero in typical circumstances.” This formula precisely revealed the extreme importance of creating a human image in relationships with the outside world. At the same time, the concept of “typical circumstances” and the category of conditionality were not universal. Οʜᴎ changed based on those scientific and philosophical achievements and discoveries on the basis of which the worldview of any era was formed.

So, for example, for the ancient Greeks the surrounding world was directly space and the will of the gods. In the literature of the 19th century we see a different understanding. In accordance with the prevailing scientific, philosophical, sociological ideas of the 19th century. realism opened up a concrete, unified reality to artistic knowledge. For realism of the 19th century, unlike romanticism, reality is no longer divided into opposing spheres of high and low, ideal and material. The surrounding world is, first of all, nature in its physical laws, which corresponded to the prevailing philosophy of positivism in the minds of that time.

At first, realism discovered the conditioning of man by time and environment. Next, the refinement process began. Soon the realistic depiction of man came to the historical and social explanation of man. The fact is that the new concept of reality, which appeared in the 19th century, also gives rise to a new understanding of conditionality. Hence, the motivations for the actions of literary heroes change. In pre-realistic literature, the motives for actions were based on the initial principles of ideas about man. Man was understood as the sum of the ideal qualities of the mind and soul. Realistic literature, having abolished this initial premise, in the psychological interpretation of its characters was based on the infinitely diverse, unforeseen possibilities of the human personality itself and concrete reality. Realism was passionate about consistent determinism, the search for connections and causes in the construction of human character. Causality is the basic principle of the relationship of elements in the artistic structure of realism.

And what we now take for granted was once a discovery. So, for example, Germaine de Staël wrote that quite recently the discovery was made that climate, climatic conditions influence the formation of both human character, temperament and the national appearance of a particular people as a whole.

The character of Turgenev's Bazarov is determined, first of all, by history. According to the remark of L.Ya. Ginzburg, ʼʼHistory has penetrated inside the character and works from the inside. Its properties are generated by a given historical situation and outside of this they have no meaning. At the beginning of the novel, Turgenev intensifies Bazarov’s portrait features: “a long robe”, “a red hand”, which he is in no hurry to give to Kirsanov; he does not consider it necessary to wash and change clothes while on the road. If we remove these characteristics of Bazarov’s character from history, then we can conclude that the hero is sloppy. “But the signs of Bazarov’s appearance and behavior in the context of the novel can be read historically. Then instead of rudeness and sloppiness it turns out nihilismʼʼ. If Turgenev determines the very nihilistic character of Bazarov, then Tolstoy determines the very alternation of the mental states of his heroes.

Human consciousness of the twentieth century. compared to the nineteenth century. expanded the list of conditions of the surrounding world that influence a person, and vice versa, a person influencing these conditions. A person interacts with the space, time, surrounding him, numerous cosmic forces, forces generated by the absurd reality, the technocratic world, forces located in the person himself, but which he is unable to control, etc.

We will talk in more detail about these problems of modern literature in specific analyzes of the works of this or that author.

Literature 1985–1991

The starting point of the modern literary process is a political event - the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, held in April 1985, at which M.S. Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. At the plenum the slogans were proclaimed: “Perestroika, Glasnost, Pluralism”.

It seemed that the country was on the verge of radical change. At the same time, it soon became clear that Gorbachev was internally only ready to reform and improve the existing communist system, and not destroy it, and build something fundamentally new. Yes, Gorbachev became the president of the Soviet Union, but at the same time he remained the general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Under him, the party remained the only power structure in the USSR, to which the army and the KGB were subordinate.

Let us recall the main events of these years.

April 25, 1986 - There was an explosion at Chernobyl, a fire in the reactor and the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

November 1986 ᴦ. – screening of Abuladze’s film “Repentance”

Summer 1988 ᴦ. – the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh. This mountainous region is part of Azerbaijan and is inhabited mainly by Armenians. The conflict traced back to the oppression of Armenians by the Azerbaijani authorities. The Armenians of Karabakh demanded independence and then annexation to Armenia.

In the spring of 1989. It became obvious that Gorbachev was beginning to lag behind the democratic wave that he himself had generated.

May 1989 – Creation of the first Parliament.

September 1989 ᴦ. Conflict and strikes in the Baltic states. Demand for independence. The situation is acute in Moldova. Continuation of the conflict in Azerbaijan.

November 1989 – abolition of Article 6 of the USSR Constitution. It stated that the CPSU directs the entire economic and social life of the country as the “ruling party”. Thus, the country overnight lost an all-pervasive instrument of coercion and control of all economic activities of a huge country. The people perceived this act as the onset of an era of anarchy. In a country with a destroyed mechanism of totalitarianism, the mechanism of democracy has not yet been built, which is why the power vacuum has intensified.

December 1989 ᴦ. The beginning of the liberation of Europe from socialism. The Berlin Wall collapsed. The East Germans united with the Federal Republic of Germany.

December 15, 1989 ᴦ. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, father, died hydrogen bomb and one of the leaders of the dissidence.

September 1990 ᴦ. – a plan for the transition to the market “500 days program” was created. G. Yavlinsky and others.

On the night of January 12-13, 1991. In Vilnius, troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and paratroopers seized the building of the television center. 10 tanks took part in the operation. 14 people were killed, 200 wounded.

By 1991 ᴦ. it became clear that the perestroika that began in 1985 had reached its logical end. It turned out to be impossible to increase the efficiency of the existing communist system; all possible resources had already been exhausted. This is evidenced by the political events of 1991.

August 19, 1991 ᴦ. there was a suppression of the coup of right-wing forces in Moscow, the so-called August putsch (B. Pugo, G. Yanaev, V. Pavlov, O. Baklanov).

On August 23, Yeltsin signed a decree “On the suspension of the activities of the Communist Party of the RSFSR for supporting the putsch.”

On August 24, M. Gorbachev announced his resignation from the title of General Secretary of the party and called on the CPSU Central Committee to decide on self-dissolution. M. Geller notes: “The wise Stalin, when liquidating the communists, did not touch the structure of the party. Gorbachev demanded that the party itself, as such, commit harakiri to itself.

December 8, 1991 ᴦ. The presidents of Russia, Ukraine and the chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus announced the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of the Community of Independent States. They had no right to dissolve the Soviet Union, but as a result of this action, Gorbachev automatically ceased to be President of the USSR. And Yeltsin, the President of Russia, became the main figure in the political arena. So, almost simultaneously, Gorbachev ceased to perform the duties of both president and general secretary. The Gorbachev era was over.

M. Geller in his “Russian Notes” placed the remark of the American journalist Bill Keller that “perestroika fit between two phone calls: in December 1986. Gorbachev called Andrei Sakharov, starting new era; Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis called Gorbachev on January 13, 1991, wanting to know the reasons for the provocative actions of the troops in Vilnius, but heard from the secretary that the president was sleeping and did not order to wake him up.

One can doubt almost all the achievements of Gorbachev's perestroika, except glasnost. It was allowed to talk about many things that had previously been under the strictest censorship ban. Censorship was abolished and virtually complete freedom of the press was established.

This meant, firstly, the legalization of dissidence (dissent) or, in other words, political opposition. Secondly, the refusal to strictly follow the political myth that was created over the course of seven decades of Soviet power, which, in turn, made it possible to objectively analyze the long and recent history of the Russian state. And thirdly, this was a way out of the impasse of socialist realist literature.

Glasnost was understood Russian intelligentsia first of all, as the right to freedom of opinion in both the political and aesthetic fields. The practical fruits of this understanding were not long in coming and immediately radically changed the literary situation. Publications began to appear. Viktor Toporov noted in 1989: “What is happening in literature now is not so much the process of nominating new significant names<…>and not so much the process of returning names and works<…>as a designation - still very approximate - of the contours of our literature in its historical development. And further: “According to the subtle remark of T.S. Eliot, every essentially new work introduced or returned to literary use forces us to change our attitude towards all works previously recognized and existing in the collective reader's consciousness.

The period from 1985 to 1991 was marked, first of all, by that acute literature that stated the severe crisis of our time, by those works that, for censorship reasons, could not see the light of day earlier.

Immediately after the 1985 plenum. works appeared, the pathos of which can be called revealing. In the second half of 1985. came out "Fire" by V. Rasputin ("Our Contemporary" 1985. No. 7). In 1986 ᴦ. – “The Sad Detective” by V. Astafieva (October 1986. No. 1), “The Scaffold” by Ch. Aitmatova (New World.
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The works of Astafiev, Rasputin, Aitmatov, Belov, published in the second half of the 80s, exposed not only totalitarianism, the phenomena and consequences of Stalin and Brezhnev times, they stated a national spiritual crisis. And pointing to this crisis, they prophesied about irreparable disasters that could befall the people. Thus, V. Rasputin in “Fire”, within the framework of symbolic imagery, “predicted” both the Chernobyl events and the death of the empire. The fire in Rasputin's story did not arise as a result of a natural disaster; it was caused by human carelessness, debauchery and laziness.

The tasks of realist writers included an appeal to the moral norm of the nation, the memory of it, despite its virtual absence in modern reality. Hence the prophetic intonations of these writers. For this reason, the works of realist writers of this time acquire a journalistic orientation, often bypassing artistic imagery, which directly turns into a direct author’s statement. “The Sad Detective” is very close to the direct author’s thoughts of V. Astafiev. Why did I. Zolotussky rightly and very accurately call Astafiev’s novel “the cry of the author’s confession”. In his work, Astafiev assesses the level of morality of the entire society. And the main questions asked by district police officer Soshnin and, to a greater extent, Astafiev himself: How to continue to live? Why did people become like this? Who is guilty?

It should be noted that realist writers still set themselves the task of creating a three-dimensional, multi-colored, plastically perfect world that exists as if independently of the author. That is, the ideal for them remained the tradition of the 19th century, the desire to preserve the main thing for the 19th century. novel genre. This situation created a confrontation between realist writers and representatives of the so-called “other prose,” underground literature, postmodern literature, who sought radical transformations of traditional aesthetics. But postmodern literature fully emerges from underground already in the Yeltsin, and not Gorbachev, era, in the 90s, and not in the 80s.

Another feature of the second half of the 80s is the “rehabilitation parade”. The process of returning literature has begun. The picture of the literary process was rapidly losing its epic solidity, becoming more and more eclectic, more and more motley and mosaic.

The revealing works contained two extremely important ones for the literary situation of the 80s. internal tendencies that very soon showed themselves in literature of a somewhat different kind. In the second half of the 80s. the revealing fact turned out to be more important and more necessary for public opinion than the aesthetic fact. For this reason, the process in which journalism, which by its nature is designed to work not with fiction, but with fact, takes on the revealing function becomes completely legitimate. For this reason, it acquires such a loud sound at the turn of the 80s and 90s.

In parallel with journalism, the so-called so-called ʼʼhardʼʼ or “natural” prose, which is what the critics noted: “...the renewal of prose and journalism was ensured by the discovery of previously forbidden topics.”

Among its authors are L. Gabysheva, A. Golovin. One of the first such works, which was also a declaration of the aesthetics of “hard prose,” was the story S. Kaledina ʼʼHumble Cemetery ʼʼ.

Reader interest in this kind of work of “hard prose” is based on a special turn of the topic, unusual for socialist realist literature.

It cannot be said that the theme of death and cemeteries is new in Russian literature. Consciousness of the 19th century. suggested an elegiac, sometimes sentimental attitude towards death. Thus, the genre of elegy, turning to the theme of death, reflected on the frailty of human life, on the triumph of death over life (Pushkin, Baratynsky). The consciousness of the twentieth century brought new meanings to the traditional images of the grave and cemetery. Οʜᴎ could be perceived as a symbol, a mythologeme (see, for example, “The Pit” by A. Platonov). End of the 20th century unfolds the conversation about death in its own way.

Kaledin sees death from the literary, physiological, realistic, and, in fact, quasi-realistic side. He talks about the cemetery as it appears to a person at the end of the twentieth century, a resident of the capital city. Kaledin's interest is focused on those who serve the dead in one of the capital's giant cemeteries. And this description can be read as a desire to create a model of life for the Soviet state as a whole, with its own hierarchy, with its own laws. More precisely, he strives to show those aspects of Soviet life, the depiction of which was taboo for a long time. Kaledin focused his interest primarily on the cruel, bloody, dirty, non-aesthetic side of cemetery existence. And he shows it as an everyday household norm.

The main character of the story is Alexey Sergeevich Vorobyov, Sparrow, as his comrades call him. Sparrow is a gravedigger. The manager of a funeral service bureau, Petrovich takes Sparrow to work despite the fact that Sparrow is a group II disabled person. He became disabled after his brother broke his skull in a drunken fight. And now on one place on Sparrow’s head the skin is stretched over a broken skull, without cranial bones.

The story opens with an episode in which Petrovich shows Sparrow the place where he needs to dig a grave hole. Sparrow immediately understands that they have “pushed the ownerless” (in professional jargon this means that in the place of an ownerless grave, which no one has visited for a long time and no one cares for, a new burial will be made). Naturally, big money is paid for breaking the rules.

The sparrow begins to dig a hole. And he does it with skill and daring, with special professionalism, with special beauty: “The sparrow spat on the left one, yellow with a solid callus, grabbed the fork of the shovel, and twisted it around the axis. With his right hand he grabbed the handle right next to the iron and, with a whistle, thrust the shovel into the ground. And went. I rarely dug like this, only when time was running out, when the coffin was already out of the church, but the grave had not been started.

The legs stay in place, do not twitch, all the work is done with the arms and body. Drive a shovel into the ground - and rip it to hell! He drove it in, tore it off - and onto the top all in one fell swoop, with one turn, using only his hands. Without a leg. Just like that!ʼʼ

And it’s a pity for Sparrow that no one sees his beautiful work. Because “in other cemeteries, no one can do this without a leg.” The sparrow saw all sorts of things, but so that the hole would be ready in 40 minutes, there are no more of them. And it won't. Only he is Sparrow!ʼʼ. In Sparrow’s reflections there is pride in his ability to work. He is also proud that he has his own professional digging technique - without a leg, with just his hands. At the same time, Sparrow does not always dig up the required 1.5 meters, only on special orders from the manager. For ordinary burials, he makes a hack: he pours loose soil around the perimeter of the grave, which creates the illusion of extremely important depth.

The cemetery has its own laws. You can look for “red”, that is, gold teeth, in graves, you can cheat on clients: make a gravestone, flower bed, fence, etc. to order. But a percentage of the income received must be sent to the excavator foreman, whose name is Molchok. The digger Garik, who did not want to obey these rules, ended up in the Sklifasovsky hospital with his head pierced with a spatula.

The gravediggers have completely atrophied normal human reactions. In the cemetery, life and death are devalued, moral concepts are inverted, and the gravediggers do not know the concept of “blasphemy.” The evil that the heroes of the story commit is not even motivated: it is out of boredom, to have fun. So Sparrow “jokes” with the dog. He puts her in the oven and laughs when the scorched dog begins to howl. And the old front-line soldier, the drunkard Kutya, dresses stray dogs in wreaths from the graves. But moral standards are distorted not only among those in cemeteries. And life outside the fence presents monstrous, from an ethical point of view, twists. An eighty-year-old man, for whom it is time to think about the eternal, wants to bury a cat in the grave of his mother. It doesn’t even occur to the old man that he is doing something unnatural.

What is striking here is not so much the naturalistic, detailed ordinariness of such existence, but rather the insensitivity of the heroes to it. It is worth saying that this is the norm for them. They don't know any other life.

According to the plot of the story, Petrovich is removed from his post for uncovering the ownerless grave that Sparrow was digging. The fact is that this ownerless grave was located next to the Decembrist memorial. And three years ago, the cultural department scheduled this ownerless building for demolition, and in its place planned to build steps to the memorial. When the question arises about who carried out Petrovich’s instructions, the gravediggers do not hand over Sparrow. There is a threat of dismissal of every second gravedigger from Petrovich's brigade. And then Sparrow gets up and admits that he was digging, after which he goes and gets drunk. Among the terrible cemetery life that the author depicts, Sparrow turned out to be capable of normal human action. There is a moment of glimmer of goodness in the midst of a terrible nightmare. And it seems that this leaves the reader some hope that not everything human has died in the world. But the ending of the story destroys illusions: if something bright comes through in the life of the same Leshka Sparrow, then it will be like the last step, like a sip of vodka, which turned out to be fatal for him.

Kaledin's story is written in naturalistic traditions. The description of life in the cemetery is given in deliberately physiological detail. And these details concern not so much human death as the struggle for the lives and money of those serving the cemetery.

Kaledin's interest is focused on depicting those who send the dead to last way, on their attitude towards life and death. And it shows the harsh sides of cemetery existence. Shows them as the norm. This was S. Kaledin’s artistic discovery. At the same time, Kaledin’s artistic discoveries end here. If there is a theme in the story, strictly speaking, there is no conflict. For this reason, plot development, which would explore this conflict, is essentially absent; it is replaced by description.

It should be noted that the aesthetics of “natural” prose was brilliantly used by journalism in the first years of glasnost. And there it turned out to be more organic than in the “hard prose” itself. Kaledin very soon ceased to arouse active reader interest precisely because his journalism portrayed post-Soviet reality harsher, more unsightly, and more tragic than “natural” prose did. Kaledin, as an artist, turned out to be unable to evolve, preferring extensive (thematic) development to intensive. In the same traditions of naturalistic description, S. Kaledin’s “Stroibat”, also dedicated to

Problems of development of modern literature - concept and types. Classification and features of the category “Problems of the development of modern literature” 2017, 2018.

The events that occurred in the last decades of the last century affected all spheres of life, including culture. Significant changes were also observed in fiction. With the adoption of the new Constitution, a turning point occurred in the country, which could not but affect the way of thinking and the worldview of citizens. New value guidelines have emerged. Writers, in turn, reflected this in their work.

The topic of today's story is modern Russian literature. What trends have been observed in prose in recent years? What features are inherent in the literature of the 21st century?

Russian language and modern literature

The literary language has been processed and enriched by great masters of words. It should be considered one of the highest achievements of national speech culture. At the same time, it is impossible to separate the literary language from the folk language. The first person to understand this was Pushkin. The great Russian writer and poet showed how to use speech material created by the people. Today, in prose, authors often reflect the folk language, which, however, cannot be called literary.

Time frame

When using a term such as “modern Russian literature,” we mean prose and poetry created in the early nineties of the last century and in the 21st century. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, dramatic changes occurred in the country, as a result of which literature, the role of the writer, and the type of reader became different. In the 1990s, the works of such authors as Pilnyak, Pasternak, Zamyatin finally became available to ordinary readers. The novels and stories of these writers have, of course, been read before, but only by advanced book lovers.

Liberation from prohibitions

In the 1970s, a Soviet person could not calmly walk into a bookstore and buy the novel Doctor Zhivago. This book, like many others, was banned for a long time. In those distant years, it was fashionable for representatives of the intelligentsia, even if not out loud, to scold the authorities, criticize the “correct” writers approved by it and quote “forbidden” ones. The prose of disgraced authors was secretly reprinted and distributed. Those who were involved in this difficult matter could lose their freedom at any time. But banned literature continued to be reprinted, distributed and read.

Years have passed. The power has changed. Such a concept as censorship simply ceased to exist for some time. But, oddly enough, people did not line up in long lines for Pasternak and Zamyatin. Why did it happen? In the early 1990s, people lined up at grocery stores. Culture and art were in decline. Over time, the situation improved somewhat, but the reader was no longer the same.

Many of today's critics speak very unflatteringly about prose of the 21st century. What the problem of modern Russian literature is will be discussed below. First, it is worth talking about the main trends in the development of prose in recent years.

The Other Side of Fear

During times of stagnation, people were afraid to say an extra word. This phobia turned into permissiveness in the early nineties of the last century. Modern Russian literature of the initial period is completely devoid of an instructive function. If, according to a survey conducted in 1985, the most read authors were George Orwell and Nina Berberova, 10 years later the books “Filthy Cop” and “Profession - Killer” became popular.

In modern Russian literature at the initial stage of its development, phenomena such as total violence and sexual pathologies prevailed. Fortunately, during this period, as already mentioned, authors from the 1960s and 1970s became available. Readers also had the opportunity to get acquainted with foreign literature: from Vladimir Nabokov to Joseph Brodsky. The work of previously banned authors has had a positive impact on Russian modern fiction.

Postmodernism

This movement in literature can be characterized as a peculiar combination of ideological attitudes and unexpected aesthetic principles. Postmodernism developed in Europe in the 1960s. In our country, it took shape as a separate literary movement much later. There is no single picture of the world in the works of postmodernists, but there is a variety of versions of reality. The list of modern Russian literature in this direction includes, first of all, the works of Viktor Pelevin. In the books of this writer, there are several versions of reality, and they are by no means mutually exclusive.

Realism

Realist writers, unlike modernists, believe that there is meaning in the world, but it must be found. V. Astafiev, A. Kim, F. Iskander are representatives of this literary movement. We can say that in recent years the so-called village prose has regained popularity. Thus, one often encounters depictions of provincial life in the books of Alexei Varlamov. The Orthodox faith is, perhaps, the main one in the prose of this writer.

A prose writer can have two tasks: moralizing and entertaining. There is an opinion that third-rate literature entertains and distracts from everyday life. Real literature makes the reader think. Nevertheless, among the topics of modern Russian literature, crime occupies not the last place. The works of Marinina, Neznansky, Abdullaev, perhaps, do not inspire deep reflection, but they gravitate towards the realistic tradition. The books of these authors are often called “pulp fiction.” But it is difficult to deny the fact that both Marinina and Neznansky managed to occupy their niche in modern prose.

The books of Zakhar Prilepin, a writer and famous public figure, were created in the spirit of realism. Its heroes mainly live in the nineties of the last century. Prilepin's work evokes mixed reactions among critics. Some consider one of his most famous works, “Sankya,” to be a kind of manifesto for the younger generation. And Nobel laureate Günter Grass called Prilepin’s story “The Vein” very poetic. Opponents of the Russian writer’s work accuse him of neo-Stalinism, anti-Semitism and other sins.

Women's prose

Does this term have a right to exist? It is not found in the works of Soviet literary scholars, yet the role of this phenomenon in the history of literature is not denied by many modern critics. Women's prose is not just literature created by women. It appeared in the era of the birth of emancipation. Such prose reflects the world through the eyes of a woman. Books by M. Vishnevetskaya, G. Shcherbakova, and M. Paley belong to this direction.

Are the works of Booker Prize winner Lyudmila Ulitskaya women's prose? Maybe only individual works. For example, stories from the collection "Girls". Ulitskaya’s heroes are equally men and women. In the novel “The Kukotsky Case,” for which the writer was awarded a prestigious literary award, the world is shown through the eyes of a man, a professor of medicine.

Not many modern Russian works of literature are actively translated into foreign languages ​​today. Such books include novels and stories by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Victor Pelevin. Why are there so few Russian-language writers today who are interesting in the West?

Lack of interesting characters

According to publicist and literary critic Dmitry Bykov, modern Russian prose uses outdated narrative techniques. Over the past 20 years, not a single living, interesting character has appeared whose name would become a household name.

In addition, unlike foreign authors who are trying to find a compromise between seriousness and mass appeal, Russian writers seem to be divided into two camps. The creators of the above-mentioned “pulp fiction” belong to the first group. The second includes representatives of intellectual prose. A lot of arthouse literature is being created that even the most sophisticated reader cannot understand, and not because it is extremely complex, but because it has no connection with modern reality.

Publishing business

Today in Russia, according to many critics, there are talented writers. But there aren't enough good publishers. Books by “promoted” authors regularly appear on the shelves of bookstores. Out of thousands of works of low-quality literature, not every publisher is ready to look for one that is worth attention.

Most of the books of the writers mentioned above reflect the events not of the beginning of the 21st century, but of the Soviet era. In Russian prose, according to one of the famous literary critics, nothing new has appeared over the past twenty years, since writers have nothing to talk about. In conditions of family disintegration, it is impossible to create a family saga. In a society in which priority is given to material issues, an instructive novel will not arouse interest.

One may not agree with such statements, but there really are no modern heroes in modern literature. Writers tend to turn to the past. Perhaps the situation in the literary world will soon change, authors will appear who are capable of creating books that will not lose popularity in a hundred or two hundred years.

Literature, as we know, is a special way of understanding existence through an artistic image. The focus of her attention, starting from the most ancient times, is man. And if in painting there are genres where the presence of a person is not required (still life, landscape, animalistic works), then in literature this is almost impossible to achieve. And since man is the central object of attention of a literary work, the development of literature can be considered as development of ways to depict the human personality in a work of art.

One of the main paths of development that world literature found was the path of psychologizing the literary hero. Starting from ancient Greek literature, which greatly influenced the development of European literatures, until the end of the 19th century, literature found more and more new ways of in-depth depiction of the inner world, the mental and psychological life of a person. Therefore, one of the main problems in the development of literature is character problem. And Russian culture also “moved irresistibly towards a person understood in his historical, social, psychological concreteness.”

In order to understand what, in fact, we are talking about, it is necessary to remember how exactly the way of depicting human character changed.

So, for example, I.S. Turgenev, a master of historical typification, in the novel “Fathers and Sons” the main discovery was the character of Yevgeny Vasilyevich Bazarov, which defines the traits of an entire generation. Turgenev creates a literary character due to the fact that he grasped the structure of the corresponding historical character, the template of this character. L.Ya wrote about this. Ginzburg in his work “On Psychological Prose.”

The main, defining feature of this character is the principle of staticity. The image of Bazarov appears before the reader as an already established large and integral character. What means does Turgenev choose to portray him? This is a portrait, the speech of the hero, his thoughts. In addition, Bazarov’s character is also revealed in his clashes with other characters in the novel: Bazarov - the Kirsanov brothers, Bazarov - Kukshina, etc. That is, the organization of the plot of the novel by the author is for him a way of revealing the character of the hero. In describing the character of Bazarov, Turgenev pursues the goal of giving this static, established character as fully and comprehensively as possible, to describe it from all sides.

Creativity L.N. Tolstoy is distinguished by unprecedented self-analysis. “Tolstoy’s work is the highest point of the analytical, explanatory psychologism." That’s why Tolstoy’s heroes are different. Turgenev builds “unmixed types.” In Bazarov he sees only a nihilist. And everything in the novel works to fully reveal this nihilism in Bazarov’s character. Tolstoy's heroes are complex. But their main difference from Turgenev’s hero is that the character of Tolstoy’s heroes is dynamic. The character of his heroes lacks the static character that distinguishes Turgenev's heroes. Tolstoy's characters develop. The guess that a person is internally changeable, his character is not something formed and settled once and for all, was the artistic discovery of L.N. Tolstoy. This is the discovery of Tolstoy N.G. Chernyshevsky very accurately called it “the dialectics of the soul.”

F.M. Dostoevsky made another great discovery in the characterology of the literary hero. Dostoevsky discovered that the inner world of man consists of insoluble contradictions. That is, it contains polar opposite principles, the lightest and the darkest in their complex unity and confrontation. The psychological structure of the human soul in Dostoevsky is so complex that from the brightest motives in the shortest possible time a person can indulge in the darkest dictates of his soul, and vice versa. Almost all of Dostoevsky’s novels are built on this psychological discovery. There are not only positive or only negative heroes: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is both a criminal and a repentant sinner; pride - the Napoleonic ideal, “I have the right” - and humility coexist in him.

The novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy turned out to be the pinnacle achievements that were potentially contained in the phenomenon called the Russian psychological novel. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky discovered and realized in artistic practice the most important, most profound possibilities of the psychological novel, which was characterized by a keen interest in mental contradictions and the details of the mental process. Thus, basically, the idea of ​​a psychological novel turned out to be exhausted. This exhaustion, as mentioned above, was felt at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and was called the “crisis of the novel genre,” associated with the collapse of humanistic ideology as a whole.

Then there were two possible paths. The first way is the continuation of the tradition of Tolstoy-Dostoevsky. This is the main path of “realistic prose” of the twentieth century. The development of creativity of such artists as A. Kuprin, A. Fadeev, A. Tolstoy, F. Abramov, V. Rasputin, V. Astafiev, A. Solzhenitsyn and others proceeded mainly within the framework of a realistic psychological novel. The problems posed in the works of these writers were different from those in the literature of the 19th century, and the method of creating human character remained basically the same.

Another way is the way of radically rethinking the possibilities of the large form, the novel genre. A.A. Akhmatova once noted that for the development of twentieth-century literature, the work of three European writers turned out to be extremely important: Kafka, Joyce and Proust. The difference between their prose and a psychological novel is that it explores not so much the psychology, the character of the hero, but his consciousness, and consciousness as such, outside the uniqueness of an individual human personality. Therefore, this line of development of the European novel was called the “novel of consciousness.”

It is known that the era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe was marked by an explosion of interest in psychological science and great achievements in it. Here it is enough to name the names of such psychologists as Sigmund Freud, who discovered the sphere of the subconscious in the human psyche, and Carl Gustav Jung, who developed the ideas of his teacher Freud and gave definitions to such concepts as archetype and collective unconscious.

In the 20th century Attempts were made to get rid of psychological generalization. And in Western prose of the twentieth century. there is a process of consistent decrease in character. And if Tolstoy liberated processes, making them the subject of artistic research, then in the twentieth century. they tried to reduce man only to processes. Literature of the 20th century. sought to explore more or less pure processes, processes without humans, ideally pure fluidity. The depiction of characters in psychological prose was now replaced by the depiction of “only states oscillating at the border of consciousness and the subconscious.”

Literature at the end of the 19th century. developed parallel to contemporary psychological science. It was also aimed at discovering the basic laws of the work of the conscious and unconscious in the human psyche. In the short story genre, Kafka as an artist explores the depths of the subconscious in the human psyche. By his own admission, his short stories are just a record of his own dreams, containing no fiction. And sleep, according to Freud and Jung, is a manifestation of the subconscious at the moment when consciousness weakens its control over the unconscious manifestations of the human psyche.

Proust constructs his novel In Search of Lost Time as a “stream of consciousness.” Proust is not interested in the uniqueness of the human personality, the uniqueness of his qualities, but in the laws of internal speech, which has not yet achieved organized embodiment in words. A technique that postmodernists are extremely fond of using in the modern literary situation.

Joyce, in turn, discovers the associativity of human perception and thinking; his novel “Ulysses” is built on this discovery. Marion Bloom's internal monologue in Joyce's novel is a gigantic web of unpredictable associations that unfolds over dozens of pages, without a single punctuation mark.

That is, by the beginning of the twentieth century in the European novel there was an active transfer of artistic interest from building the character of a literary hero to the study and reconstruction of the mechanism of the subconscious and cognitive processes. At the same time, as a modern researcher correctly notes, “The titans of early modernism – Joyce, Kafka, Proust – created not only a new literary world, but also a different reader’s consciousness.” In the process of research and reproduction of the structure of consciousness in the works of art of these writers, a re-creation of the living, real, and not artificially recreated consciousness of literary heroes, the consciousness of contemporaries took place. We can say that these writers, having identified the main structural features of consciousness, became participants in the breakdown of the old, “nineteen” consciousness, and the creators of the new consciousness of man in the twentieth century.

However, this process also has another side. Already naturalism and positivism of the 19th century, and then the psychological discoveries of the 20th century. completely deny the integrity of the human personality. For a bundle of perceptions, a change of sensations, a fractional part of the cycle of nature is not a person. Psychology at the turn of the century abandoned the categories of personality and character. The personality dissolves in a continuously changing stream of mental states.

Russian writers of the early twentieth century sensed the enormous potential inherent in the so-called “novel of consciousness.” Therefore, they also conducted experiments in this direction. This trend can be observed in the works of Andrei Bely: in the story “Kitten Letaev” and in the novel “Petersburg”, in the novel “Little Demon” by F. Sologub, in the story “Childhood Eyelets” by B. Pasternak, etc. This was the way destruction of character. And in the era of the collapse of humanism, it could not be otherwise. Since the human personality during this period loses its own integrity and uniqueness, it breaks up into a number of components: consciousness, subconscious, psyche, gender, etc.

It is possible that on this path of crossing the traditional psychological novel with the new possibilities of the “novel of consciousness” the main discoveries of Russian literature of the twentieth century awaited. But for objective socio-historical reasons this did not happen. The natural development of the literary process was interrupted and replaced by regulated and controlled literary creativity. Therefore, during the Soviet period of the development of literature of the twentieth century, only that literature was officially recognized that met the requirements of the method of socialist realism. This meant that Soviet literature was largely forced to exist within the framework of inheriting the traditions of the realistic psychological novel of the 19th century. She learned to make good use of those artistic discoveries that were made by the literature of the 19th century.

In the modern literary situation of the 80-90s, writers again turned to the achievements of the “novel of consciousness” and the experiments of Russian modernists. First of all, this applies to those artists who are commonly called postmodernists. It is possible, and most likely, that they do not write pure “prose of consciousness,” but combine various elements of all the achievements and discoveries of literature, both realistic and modernist. But there is clearly a tendency to study a person not only and not so much from the side of character, but from the side of his consciousness. And of particular interest to modern literature are any pathological deviations from the average normal consciousness. This is, for example, “School for Fools” by Sasha Sokolov (see the corresponding lecture). Postmodernist prose is also subject to the law of character destruction, which, by its nature, destroys traditional plot structure.

Another important problem of twentieth-century literature is problem of perception. Realistic literature of the 19th century embodied in artistic forms a realistic way of perceiving reality. To the “nineteen-year-old consciousness,” this method seemed the most plausible, capable of most faithfully conveying a person in the world around him.

However, throughout its development, art also knew other ways of perceiving reality. For example, myth, from the point of view of a person of the 19th century, conveys reality not realistically, but fantastically, mythologically. From the height of the experience of the 19th century, reality, recreated in myth, was recreated incorrectly, it is fiction, fantasy, a fairy tale. But for the consciousness of the ancient Greek himself, who perceives the myth, it completely corresponds to the reality that ancient man perceives with his senses.

The essence of the problem of perception for literature lies in the fact that over the course of the thousand-year development of human civilization there have been staged changes in human consciousness, and therefore in the perception of the surrounding reality. Therefore, the perception of reality by the medieval consciousness in the most radical way does not coincide with the perception of reality by a person of the 19th century. The perception of the Russian symbolists of the early twentieth century, for whom existence was revealed in a mystical, symbolic light, categorically did not coincide with the perception of the realists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The symbolists perceived what the realists, who did not have the reception organs to capture the mystical reality, were not able to perceive.

In Soviet literature, it was allowed to perceive the world exclusively realistically, but not symbolically, mystically, surrealistically, fantastically, etc.

Postmodern literature differs from realistic literature, first of all, in the way it perceives reality. In the works of postmodernists, the world is almost unrecognizable. The contours of space change, time flows both forward and backward. The simplest logical laws are not observed: cause-and-effect, unity-multiplicity, uniqueness-universality, etc. All this becomes the reason that the world around us, as depicted by postmodernists, loses its realistic outlines and acquires features of absurdity. Being, organized and developing according to certain laws - physical, chemical, biological, social, historical, in postmodern literature loses these laws and the world returns to its pre-organized, chaotic state.

The problem of conditioning. From the point of view of realistic literature, the image of a person will be described more accurately the more accurately his interactions with the outside world are explained and reproduced. In literary criticism, until recently, the formula was mandatory: “a typical hero in typical circumstances.” This formula precisely revealed the need to create a human image in relationships with the outside world. However, the concept of “typical circumstances” and the category of conditionality were not universal. They changed depending on the scientific and philosophical achievements and discoveries on the basis of which the worldview of a particular era was formed.

So, for example, for the ancient Greeks the surrounding world was directly space and the will of the gods. In the literature of the 19th century we see a different understanding. In accordance with the prevailing scientific, philosophical, sociological ideas of the 19th century. realism opened up a concrete, unified reality to artistic knowledge. For realism of the 19th century, unlike romanticism, reality is no longer divided into opposing spheres of high and low, ideal and material. The surrounding world is, first of all, nature in its physical laws, which corresponded to the prevailing philosophy of positivism in the minds of that time.

At first, realism discovered the conditioning of man by time and environment. Then the refinement process began. Soon the realistic depiction of man came to the historical and social explanation of man. The fact is that the new concept of reality, which appeared in the 19th century, also gives rise to a new understanding of conditionality. Hence, the motivations for the actions of literary heroes change. In pre-realistic literature, the motives for actions were based on the initial principles of ideas about man. Man was understood as the sum of the ideal qualities of the mind and soul. Realistic literature, having abolished this initial premise, in the psychological interpretation of its characters was based on the infinitely diverse, unforeseen possibilities of the human personality itself and concrete reality. Realism was passionate about consistent determinism, the search for connections and causes in the construction of human character. Causality is the basic principle of the relationship of elements in the artistic structure of realism.

And what we now take for granted was once a discovery. For example, Germaine de Staël wrote that quite recently the discovery was made that climate and climatic conditions influence the formation of both human character, temperament, and the national appearance of a particular people as a whole.

The character of Turgenev's Bazarov is determined, first of all, by history. According to the remark of L.Ya. Ginsburg, “The story has penetrated the character and is working from within. Its properties are generated by this historical situation and outside of this they have no meaning.” At the beginning of the novel, Turgenev intensifies Bazarov’s portrait features: “long robe”, “red hand”, which he is in no hurry to give to Kirsanov; he does not consider it necessary to wash and change clothes while on the road. If we remove these characteristics of Bazarov’s character from history, then we can conclude that the hero is sloppy. “But the signs of Bazarov’s appearance and behavior in the context of the novel can be read historically. Then instead of rudeness and sloppiness it turns out nihilism" If Turgenev determines the very nihilistic character of Bazarov, then Tolstoy determines the very alternation of the mental states of his heroes.

Human consciousness of the twentieth century. compared to the nineteenth century. expanded the list of conditions of the surrounding world that influence a person, and vice versa, a person influencing these conditions. A person interacts with the space, time, surrounding him, numerous cosmic forces, forces generated by the absurd reality, the technocratic world, forces located in the person himself, but which he is unable to control, etc.

We will talk in more detail about these problems of modern literature in specific analyzes of the works of this or that author.

Literature 1985–1991

The starting point of the modern literary process is a political event - the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, held in April 1985, at which M.S. Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. At the plenum the slogans were proclaimed: “Perestroika, Glasnost, Pluralism.”

It seemed that the country was on the verge of radical change. However, it soon became clear that Gorbachev was internally only ready to reform and improve the existing communist system, and not destroy it, and build something fundamentally new. Yes, Gorbachev became the president of the Soviet Union, but at the same time he remained the general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Under him, the party remained the only power structure in the USSR, to which the army and the KGB were subordinate.

Let us recall the main events of these years.

April 25, 1986 - There was an explosion at Chernobyl, a fire in the reactor and the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

November 1986 – screening of Abuladze’s film “Repentance”

Summer 1988 – the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh. This mountainous region is part of Azerbaijan and is inhabited mainly by Armenians. The conflict traced back to the oppression of Armenians by the Azerbaijani authorities. The Armenians of Karabakh demanded independence and then annexation to Armenia.

In the spring of 1989, it became obvious that Gorbachev was beginning to lag behind the democratic wave that he himself had generated.

May 1989 – Creation of the first Parliament.

September 1989 Conflict and strikes in the Baltic states. Demand for independence. The situation is acute in Moldova. Continuation of the conflict in Azerbaijan.

November 1989 – abolition of Article 6 of the USSR Constitution. It stated that the CPSU directs the entire economic and social life of the country as the “ruling party.” Thus, the country overnight lost an all-pervasive instrument of coercion and control over all economic activities of a huge country. The people perceived this act as the onset of an era of anarchy. In a country with a destroyed mechanism of totalitarianism, the mechanism of democracy has not yet been built, which is why the power vacuum has intensified.

December 1989 The beginning of the liberation of Europe from socialism. The Berlin Wall collapsed. The East Germans united with the Federal Republic of Germany.

On December 15, 1989, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb and one of the leaders of dissent, died.

September 1990 – a plan for the transition to the market “500 Day Program” was created. G. Yavlinsky and others.

On the night of January 12-13, 1991, in Vilnius, Interior Ministry troops and paratroopers captured the television center building. 10 tanks took part in the operation. 14 people were killed, 200 wounded.

By 1991, it became clear that the perestroika that began in 1985 had reached its logical end. It turned out to be impossible to increase the efficiency of the existing communist system; all possible resources had already been exhausted. This is evidenced by the political events of 1991.

On August 19, 1991, the coup of right-wing forces in Moscow, the so-called August putsch, was suppressed (B. Pugo, G. Yanaev, V. Pavlov, O. Baklanov).

On August 23, Yeltsin signed a decree “On the suspension of the activities of the Communist Party of the RSFSR for supporting the putsch.”

On August 24, M. Gorbachev announced his resignation from the title of General Secretary of the party and called on the CPSU Central Committee to decide on self-dissolution. M. Geller notes: “The wise Stalin, when liquidating the communists, did not touch the structure of the party. Gorbachev demanded that the party itself, as such, commit hara-kiri to itself.”

On December 8, 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and the chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus announced the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of the Community of Independent States. They had no right to dissolve the Soviet Union, but as a result of this action, Gorbachev automatically ceased to be President of the USSR. And Yeltsin, the President of Russia, became the main figure in the political arena. So, almost simultaneously, Gorbachev ceased to perform the duties of both president and general secretary. The Gorbachev era was over.

M. Geller in his “Russian Notes” included the remark of the American journalist Bill Keller that “perestroika fit between two phone calls: in December 1986, Gorbachev called Andrei Sakharov, starting a new era; Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis called Gorbachev on January 13, 1991, wanting to find out the reasons for the provocative actions of the troops in Vilnius, but heard from the secretary that the president was sleeping and did not order to wake him up.”

One can doubt almost all the achievements of Gorbachev's perestroika, except glasnost. It was allowed to talk about many things that had previously been under the strictest censorship ban. Censorship was abolished and virtually complete freedom of the press was established.

This meant, firstly, the legalization of dissidence (dissent) or, in other words, political opposition. Secondly, the refusal to strictly follow the political myth that was created over the course of seven decades of Soviet power, which, in turn, made it possible to objectively analyze the long and recent history of the Russian state. And thirdly, this was a way out of the impasse of socialist realist literature.

Glasnost was understood by the Russian intelligentsia primarily as the right to freedom of opinion in both the political and aesthetic fields. The practical fruits of this understanding were not long in coming and immediately radically changed the literary situation. Publications began to appear. Viktor Toporov noted in 1989: “What is happening in literature now is not so much the process of nominating new significant names<…>and not so much the process of returning names and works<…>how much of a designation – still very approximate – of the contours of our literature in its historical development.” And further: “According to the subtle remark of T.S. Eliot, every essentially new work introduced or returned to literary use forces us to change our attitude towards all works previously recognized and existing in the collective reader’s consciousness.”

The period from 1985 to 1991 was marked, first of all, by that acute literature that stated the severe crisis of our time, by those works that, for censorship reasons, could not see the light of day earlier.

Immediately after the plenum of 1985, works appeared whose pathos can be called revealing. In the second half of 1985, “Fire” by V. Rasputin was released (“Our Contemporary” 1985. No. 7). In 1986 - “The Sad Detective” by V. Astafiev (“October” 1986. No. 1), “The Scaffold” by Ch. Aitmatov (New World. 1986. No. 6-8).

The works of Astafiev, Rasputin, Aitmatov, Belov, published in the second half of the 80s, exposed not only totalitarianism, the phenomena and consequences of Stalin and Brezhnev times, they stated a national spiritual crisis. And pointing to this crisis, they prophesied about irreparable disasters that could befall the people. Thus, V. Rasputin in “Fire”, within the framework of symbolic imagery, “predicted” both the Chernobyl events and the death of the empire. The fire in Rasputin's story did not arise as a result of a natural disaster; it was caused by human carelessness, debauchery and laziness.

The tasks of realist writers included an appeal to the moral norm of the nation, the memory of it, despite its virtual absence in modern reality. Hence the prophetic intonations of these writers. Therefore, the works of realist writers of this time acquire a journalistic orientation, often bypassing artistic imagery, which directly turns into a direct author’s statement. “The Sad Detective” is very close to the direct author’s thoughts of V. Astafiev. Why did I. Zolotussky rightly and very accurately call Astafiev’s novel “the cry of the author’s confession.” In his work, Astafiev assesses the level of morality of the entire society. And the main questions asked by district police officer Soshnin and, to a greater extent, Astafiev himself: How to continue to live? Why did people become like this? Who is guilty?

It should be noted that realist writers still set themselves the task of creating a three-dimensional, multi-colored, plastically perfect world that exists as if independently of the author. That is, the ideal for them remained the tradition of the 19th century, the desire to preserve the main thing for the 19th century. novel genre. This situation created a confrontation between realist writers and representatives of the so-called “other prose,” underground literature, postmodern literature, who sought radical transformations of traditional aesthetics. But postmodern literature fully emerges from underground already in the “Yeltsin”, not the “Gorbachev” era, in the 90s, not in the 80s.

Another feature of the second half of the 80s is the “rehabilitation parade”. The process of returning literature has begun. The picture of the literary process was rapidly losing its epic solidity, becoming more and more eclectic, more and more motley and mosaic.

The revealing works contained two extremely important for the literary situation of the 80s. internal tendencies that very soon showed themselves in literature of a somewhat different kind. In the second half of the 80s. the revealing fact turned out to be more important and more necessary for public opinion than the aesthetic fact. Therefore, the process in which journalism, which by its nature is designed to work not with fiction, but with fact, takes on the revealing function becomes completely legitimate. That's why it acquired such a loud sound at the turn of the 80s and 90s.

In parallel with journalism, the so-called so-called "hard" or "natural" prose, which is what the critics noted: “... the renewal of prose and journalism was ensured by the discovery of previously forbidden topics.”

Among its authors are L. Gabysheva, A. Golovin. One of the first such works, which was also a declaration of the aesthetics of “hard” prose, was the story S. Kaledina “Humble Cemetery” ».

Reader interest in this kind of works of “hard” prose is based on a special turn of the topic, unusual for socialist realist literature.

It cannot be said that the theme of death and cemeteries is new in Russian literature. Consciousness of the 19th century. suggested an elegiac, sometimes sentimental attitude towards death. Thus, the genre of elegy, turning to the theme of death, reflected on the frailty of human life, on the triumph of death over life (Pushkin, Baratynsky). The consciousness of the twentieth century brought new meanings to the traditional images of the grave and cemetery. They could be perceived as a symbol, a mythologeme (see, for example, “The Pit” by A. Platonov). End of the 20th century unfolds the conversation about death in its own way.

Kaledin sees death from the literary, physiological, realistic, and, in fact, quasi-realistic side. He talks about the cemetery as it appears to a person at the end of the twentieth century, a resident of the capital city. Kaledin's interest is focused on those who serve the dead in one of the capital's giant cemeteries. And this description can be read as a desire to create a model of life for the Soviet state as a whole, with its own hierarchy, with its own laws. More precisely, he strives to show those aspects of Soviet life, the depiction of which was taboo for a long time. Kaledin focused his interest primarily on the cruel, bloody, dirty, non-aesthetic side of cemetery life. And shows it as an everyday household norm.

The main character of the story is Alexey Sergeevich Vorobyov, Sparrow, as his comrades call him. Sparrow is a gravedigger. The manager of a funeral service bureau, Petrovich takes Sparrow to work despite the fact that Sparrow is a group II disabled person. He became disabled after his brother broke his skull in a drunken fight. And now on one place on Sparrow’s head the skin is stretched over a broken skull, without cranial bones.

The story opens with an episode in which Petrovich shows Sparrow the place where he needs to dig a grave hole. Sparrow immediately understands that “an ownerless grave has been pushed” (in professional jargon this means that on the site of an ownerless grave, which no one has visited for a long time and no one cares for, a new burial will be made). Naturally, big money is paid for breaking the rules.

The sparrow begins to dig a hole. And he does it with skill and daring, with special professionalism, with special beauty: “The sparrow spat on the left one, which was yellow with a solid callus, grabbed the fork of the shovel, and twisted it around its axis. With his right hand he grabbed the handle right next to the piece of iron and, with a whistle, drove the shovel into the ground. And went. I rarely dug like this, only when time was running out, when the coffin was already out of the church, but the grave had not been started.

The legs stay in place, do not twitch, all the work is done with the arms and body. Drive a shovel into the ground - and rip it to hell! He hammered it in, tore it off - and everything was on top in one fell swoop, with one turn, just with his hands. Without a leg. Just like that!”

And it’s a pity for Sparrow that no one sees his beautiful work. Because “in other cemeteries, no one can do this - without a leg. The sparrow saw all sorts of things, but so that the hole would be ready in 40 minutes, there are no more of them. And it won't. Only he is the Sparrow! In Sparrow’s reflections there is pride in his ability to work. He is also proud that he has his own professional digging technique - without a leg, with just his hands. However, Sparrow does not always dig the required 1.5 meters, only on special orders from the manager. For ordinary burials, he makes a hack job: he pours loose soil around the perimeter of the grave, which creates the illusion of the required depth.

The cemetery has its own laws. You can look for “red”, that is, gold teeth, in graves, you can cheat on clients: make a gravestone, flower garden, fence, etc. to order. But a percentage of the income received must be sent to the excavator foreman, whose name is Molchok. The digger Garik, who did not want to obey these rules, ended up in the Sklifasovsky hospital with his head pierced with a spatula.

The gravediggers have completely atrophied normal human reactions. In the cemetery, life and death are devalued, moral concepts are inverted, and the gravediggers do not know the concept of “blasphemy.” The evil that the heroes of the story commit is not even motivated: it is out of boredom, to have fun. This is how Sparrow “jokes” with the dog. He puts her in the oven and laughs when the scorched dog begins to howl. And the old front-line soldier, the drunkard Kutya, dresses stray dogs in wreaths from the graves. But moral standards are distorted not only among those in cemeteries. And life outside the fence presents monstrous, from an ethical point of view, twists. An eighty-year-old man, for whom it is time to think about the eternal, wants to bury a cat in the grave of his mother. It doesn’t even occur to the old man that he is doing something unnatural.

What is striking here is not so much the naturalistic, detailed ordinariness of such existence, but rather the insensitivity of the heroes to it. This is the norm for them. They don't know any other life.

According to the plot of the story, Petrovich is removed from his post for uncovering the ownerless grave that Sparrow was digging. The fact is that this ownerless grave was located next to the Decembrist memorial. And three years ago, the cultural department scheduled this ownerless building for demolition, and in its place planned to build steps to the memorial. When the question arises about who carried out Petrovich’s instructions, the gravediggers do not hand over Sparrow. There is a threat of dismissal of every second gravedigger from Petrovich's brigade. And then Sparrow gets up and admits that he was digging, after which he goes and gets drunk. Among the terrible cemetery life that the author depicts, Sparrow turned out to be capable of normal human action. There is a moment of glimmer of goodness in the midst of a terrible nightmare. And this seems to leave the reader some hope that not everything human has died in the world. But the ending of the story destroys illusions: if something bright comes through in the life of the same Leshka Sparrow, then it will be like the last step, like a sip of vodka, which turned out to be fatal for him.

Kaledin's story is written in naturalistic traditions. The description of life in the cemetery is given in deliberately physiological detail. And these details concern not so much human death as the struggle for the lives and money of those serving the cemetery.

Kaledin's interest is focused on the depiction of those who send the dead on their final journey, on their attitude to life and death. And it shows the harsh sides of cemetery existence. Shows them as the norm. This was S. Kaledin’s artistic discovery. However, this is where Kaledin’s artistic discoveries end. If there is a theme in the story, strictly speaking, there is no conflict. Therefore, there is essentially no plot development that would explore this conflict; it is replaced by description.

It should be noted that the journalism of the first years of glasnost brilliantly took advantage of the aesthetics of “natural” prose. And there it turned out to be more organic than in the “hardest prose”. Kaledin very soon ceased to arouse active reader interest precisely because his journalism portrayed post-Soviet reality harsher, more unsightly, and more tragic than “natural” prose did. Kaledin, as an artist, turned out to be unable to evolve, preferring extensive (thematic) development to intensive. S. Kaledin’s “Stroibat”, also dedicated to the previously taboo topic of hazing in the Soviet army, was made in the same traditions of naturalistic description. This story was closed by military censorship three times. But it was still published in Novy Mir (No. 9, 1991). These two stories turned out to be the most expressive, both in the work of Kaledin himself and in the literary situation of the perestroika era.

He introduced another topic previously closed to Soviet literature during the perestroika era. O. Ermakov. First in stories and then in novels "Mark of the Beast" (Znamya. 1992. No. 6-7) he spoke with the Afghan theme. Alexander Ageev very precisely said about Ermakov, the author of Afghan stories: he fell “into the powerful field of attraction of the dominant canon of military prose and tried to say his own, as if in someone else’s voice.” Overcome this alien voice, and tell about the Afghan war in your own voice; Oleg Ermakov tried to overcome the stereotypes of describing war developed within the established tradition of “military prose” in his novel “The Mark of the Beast.”

The previously forbidden topic attracted abundant reader attention to the stories of O. Ermakov, the more they expected from his novel.

The Afghan War was “the last war of a dying empire” and the most shameful war in the entire history of the Soviet Union. It revealed not only the internal weakness of the Soviet empire, but also demonstrated its inability to continue to conduct its foreign policy from a position of strength.

As you know, the war began in 1979. The reason for the entry of Soviet units into Afghanistan was a political coup in Kabul. Those who came to power (Babrak Karmal) had a pro-Soviet orientation. However, another part of the Afghan people did not agree with this orientation, which was the reason for the outbreak of the civil war in Afghanistan. In this situation, the Soviet government supported the Afghan government that came to power. A protracted and senseless war began between Soviet soldiers, fulfilling their “international duty,” with dushmans, with spirits, as Soviet soldiers call them in Ermakov’s novel. According to A. Ageev, it was “a war without reasons or goals - war in its purest form, as if the element of war itself.” And further: “It’s not the state that fights with the state, it’s not the idea that fights with the idea, and it’s not even people with people because of some tangible, real loot. No – a person infected with the virus of violence and hatred is at war with space, time, matter, and himself.”

To the heroes of Ermakov’s novel, who are fighting behind the ridges, far from their homeland, it seems that the Soviet Union is a paradise where “there are no mines on the roads, no spooks, no jaundice.” The union is something fabulous: “There are miracles there, a goblin wanders there, mermaids sit on the branches,” “There are miracles there... Chain cats there. They sit on golden chains and walk around, telling fairy tales,” Soviet officers quote. And at the same time, they clearly realize that the Union has betrayed them. There is not a word in the official Soviet press about the Afghan war, about the real state of affairs in Afghanistan, everything there is completely false and deceitful. At a New Year's party, the sapper says: “What war? Where is the war?<…>your beloved “Red Star” writes in white and black: teachings. And this means everything is conditional: the enemy, losses, Mines, dushmans, tsinkas... The corpses of guys for whom they don’t want to give you orders<…>We exist, but we are not. Everything is conditional, this whole regiment... mountain... batteries...".

Ermakov exposes the terrible and cruel reality of the war in Afghanistan. Blood, dirt, jaundice, vodka, marijuana, robbery of villages and Afghan shops, violence, murder of prisoners, heads cut off by “spirits” from Soviet soldiers - these are the realities of this war.

But Ermakov is not content with just this. “In the novel, the “Afghan syndrome” is combined with the desire, if not to solve, then at least to establish major ideological, ontological problems" This is already evidenced by the epigraph from the Apocalypse to the novel: “And the smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever, and those who worship the beast and his image and take the form of his name will have no rest either day or night.”

In a review of the novel, I. Rodnyanskaya writes: ““The Mark of the Beast” is a book of experience, a book that does not shy away from its primary and elementary mission: to honestly tell about what has been experienced - and this is an obvious success, that the biblical and mythological currents permeating it do not deform this experience, do not destroy the certainty of evidence, but transform it.”

As noted by G.L. Nefagina, “The Mark of the Beast” “is addressed to the problem of evil, to its anthropology, to the questions of the participation of all in what is being created.” Ermakov portrays war as a huge evil of universal proportions. It is diverse in its appearance, but in essence goes back to one source: to the world of non-existence, to Hell. And the worst thing it does is destroy people’s souls.

The events of the novel take place in two dimensions at once: in the coordinate system of a three-dimensional world where war is being waged, and in the world of empty eternity, which has condoned and tacitly agreed to the existence of wars in particular and evil in general on earth.

At the center of the novel is the soldier Gleb. In his pre-army past, Gleb laid claim to intellectual uniqueness. He read Chinese lyrics, was interested in Eastern philosophy, went on long journeys, and was fond of the music of the Beatles.

Gleb ends up in Kabul with his friend Boris. They are united by a love of independence and the songs of John Lennon. Boris says: “We batten down the hatches, and if they find us, I’ll be a torpedo.<…>OK! Let's dive in!..

I found them after recovery, when the whole team arrived from the training camp to the division town<…>quite a large and determined grandfather. Having left the parade ground, they sat on the grass in the shade of a tree, and the large, determined grandfather did not like this, and he went to ram - but, having run into the eyes of a red torpedo, he became thoughtful, idled the engine and reversed.

He saw the eyes of the European, Boris said with a gloomy smile, carefully touching the rotten ear. Do you know what my look was called? The Viking's Eye."

According to the plot of the novel, having crossed the ridges, Boris and Gleb part. Boris serves in a city located on Marble Mountain, Gleb finds himself below, at the foot of Marble Mountain, in an artillery battery.

The Marble Mountain is really made of marble, and marble is the only building material from which the storeroom, the pigsty, the prison, and the latrine are built.

And here, under Marble Mountain, Gleb, left alone, without the support of Boris’s “red torpedo,” finds himself in a situation where all previous values ​​instantly lose their significance. It is almost impossible to defend your uniqueness here. Hazing reigns in the army, which crushes any attempt by anyone to defend their own individuality. New recruits are doomed to be bullied by old-timers, “footcloth Napoleons,” so that, in turn, after a year and a half, they will beat the faces of young soldiers. In the world of non-existence, evil infinity reigns, where evil is doomed to eternal repetition, even if someone does not want it.

Remembering Boris's behest, Gleb tries to resist this faceless force. He seeks to organize a revolt of the “sons” against the “grandfathers,” but it ends with Gleb being denounced and beaten by the grandfathers, who were high on marijuana. After this, Gleb internally broke down and obeyed the laws of evil, which were dictated by this world of death and non-existence. He gradually loses his human traits, turning from Gleb to Turtle, from man to beast. Just like others, the war marked him with its mark, put on him the mark of the beast. He quickly becomes like "everyone." According to G.L. Nefagina, “He also robs shops and stores in an Afghan town, although he still tries to preserve his “specialness”: he drags not a Japanese tape recorder, shoes or women’s lace underwear, but a bag of raisins, an antique dagger, a smoking pipe and a thick book on Arabic. Just like everyone else, he is present as a silent witness during the bullying of the “Nuristani” and receives from the lieutenant the musical watch taken from the prisoner.” The turtle easily submitted to the collective thoughtless behavior of everyone, forgetting about what Boris taught him.

According to the plot of the novel, it happens that Gleb, while on duty at night, shoots, as it seems to him, at giant monitor lizards crawling from the desert. But in the morning it turns out that he killed Boris. Boris, an organically free man, unable to withstand the bullying of hazing, deserted with a comrade from his unit, and came across Gleb’s post, who shoots at him. Boris found himself in the same situation as Gleb, in the essentially inhuman conditions of army service. There were two ways out of this situation: either submit and become the same as everyone else; or disobey and die. Either accept the mark of the beast, or not accept it. Gleb chose the first, Boris - the second.

The plot situation and the names of the characters, of course, refer the reader to the traditions of ancient Russian literature, among the monuments of which there is the life of the Russian holy martyrs Boris and Gleb, innocently killed by their brother Svyatopolk. But if in the Middle Ages Boris and Gleb together became victims of the lust for power of Svyatopolk the Accursed, then in the twentieth century Gleb kills his spiritual brother Boris, or, as A. Nemzer accurately notes, “Gleb turned into Svyatopolk the Accursed, doomed to Cain’s suffering.” Another critic exclaims: “But what a terrible symbol, you see – Gleb killing Boris! How absurdly, how absurdly the names that have always stood side by side in the national consciousness have been torn apart!” But such is the nature of this fratricidal war.

At the end of the novel, Gleb Turtle is discharged. He ends up in Kabul, from where all those demobilized are to be transported by plane to the Union. It was from here that the path to fratricide began for Gleb. It was here that two years ago Boris took a seat next to him in a helicopter heading to Marble Mountain for Gleb. Two years later, Gleb sees here young soldiers who have just arrived from the Union in Kabul and must now take his place at Marble Mountain, as he once replaced another fratricide. And now, two years later, when everything has already happened, Gleb plays the film of his life back and connects the beginning and end of his way of the cross, thinking that “in the morning buyers from the regiment at Marble Mountain will appear. So in the morning he must say: no. In the morning he will say: no! - and will end up on another team. He will say: no! - and will not fly to the city near Marble Mountain.” The consciousness of Gleb Turtle seems to split into two: it contains both the beginning of the bloody path and its end, after which only the eternal melancholy of unredeemed guilt remains. The novel ends with the phrase: “And the sacrifice is accomplished.” According to Ermakov, it is impossible to say this “no”, which Gleb Turtle belatedly dreams of. Cain's senseless sacrifice, which marked the beginning of human existence, is doomed to eternal repetition. Humanizing history is impossible because everyone bears the mark of the beast.

The following works by Ermakov: “Pipe of the Universe”, its parts: “Trans-Siberian Pastoral”, “Unicorn” (“Banner”. 1997) largely develop the features of Ermakov’s prose, which first appeared in “The Mark of the Beast”.

The task of the “natural” direction was to invade such areas of reality that had not previously been the object of aesthetic attention. Writers of this trend exposed and exposed the system of lies and hypocrisy that concealed the existence of “lawlessness.”

In general, “natural prose” is a natural phenomenon of the underground, “other literature”, which emerged from the depths of the opposition to official literature. This is prose, which, on the one hand, completes a huge period of development of Russian literature, and on the other hand, being in search of previously unknown paths, opens up a new one.

Literature of the 80-90s in the process of cognition

“Perestroika” gave writers the opportunity to openly talk with the reader about the country’s tragic past. The literary process of the 80s began with a statement of the crisis situation in which the country found itself by the mid-80s of the twentieth century, after more than seventy years of Soviet rule. This statement was made primarily in “Fire” by V. Rasputin, “The Sad Detective” by V. Astafiev, and “The Scaffold” by Ch. Aitmatov.

Next, work began to restore the blank spots of the history of the Soviet country. This work involved both “returned” works and those written in the mid-80s. Such as “Eves” by V. Belov (New World. 1987. No. 8), his “The Year of the Great Turning Point” (New World. 1989. No. 3), “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” by A. Pristavkin (Znamya. 1987. No. 3, 4), “Requiem” by Akhmatova (October, 1987. No. 2), “By right of memory of A. Tvardovsky (Znamya. 1987. No. 2), “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” by B. Pilnyak (Znamya. 1987. No. 12) , “Faculty of Unnecessary Things” by Y. Dombrovsky (New World. 1988. No. 8-11), “Life and Fate” by V. Grossman (October 1988. No. 1-4), “Faithful Ruslan” by G. Vladimov (Znamya. 1989. No. 2) and others. Criticism noted that in these works “the litigation is direct, frank – with historical science.” The culmination of this litigation during the years of glasnost and perestroika, according to Vl. Novikov, became the publication of “The Gulag Archipelago”. In the last decade of the twentieth century. similar works also appeared (G. Vladimov “The General and His Army” (1996), Y. Davydov “Bestseller” (2000), etc.).

This desire to take bread from historical science indicates that literature still felt itself not so much as a verbal art itself, but as “a form of political existence, a channel into which civil passions, religious feelings, ideological convictions and social interests flowed.”

Tired and exhausted in litigation with historical science, literature faced the need to create its own artistic, non-scientific image of history.

The problem of the relationship between history, the absence of history and posthistory was able to convey Evgeniy Popov in his best story “The Soul of a Patriot, or Various Messages to Ferfichkin”(“Volga”, 1989. No. 2).

In the preface, the writer states that he is only the publisher of the correspondence of a certain Evgeniy Anatolyevich Popov, separating himself from the hero-narrator, but at the same time he retains his full last name, first name, and patronymic. What emerges is a seemingly senseless bustle of parodic substitutions, transformations, and splits of Evgeniy Anatolyevich Popov, who assures the reader that he has nothing to do with the person who “seems to be writing.” However, he no longer writes “ works of art”, and whose name is also, or rather, he claims that his name is Evgeniy Anatolyevich Popov.

From the very first page of the story, the reader finds himself in an unusual artistic space in which he loses all orientation. The reader tries from the very first lines to grasp the direction of the plot, the logic of the artistic narrative, but he fails. Moreover, the reader does not have time to get angry or interested in such nonsense before the author declares that all this is unimportant. What is important here then? The addressee of the messages turns out to be important - Ferfichkin. But at the same time, it is unclear who he is, where he lives, what he does - also, how old he is is unknown.

At first, the narrative unfolds as a kind of parodic paraphrase of the sentimental “Letters of a Russian Traveler” by Karamzin. The hero describes in detail his return from a southern business trip to the North, to his “dearly beloved wife.” The plaster piggy bank that Popov looks at evokes a chain of memories of the post-war years. Then the memories of Popov's family tree begin. Using the genre of the epistolary novel, Popov fills it not so much with confessionalism, as was customary in classic “epistles to a friend.” Here, the serious, historical is constantly interrupted by sarcastic remarks, caustic jokes, and everyday details. Private family history is intertwined with the history of the country. There are no small details for a hero. He is equally interested in the prices of wine and food, family legends, and some incidents on the road. His creative attitude is that everything is a subject of art. He is interested in his relatives as a link in a chain that connects the past and the present, and can provide some explanation for the future.

In addition to the parody of the epistolary novel, Popov’s story also distinguishes a parody of the “historical chronicle” genre. The author sarcastically reproduces the problems, favorite approaches and techniques of “village” prose, known for its sublime attitude towards legend and tribal traditions.

In this sense, one of the characteristic stories is the story about milk in a bottle.

“... the Austrian city of Vienna! You and I, Ferfichkin, have never been to the Austrian city of Vienna, but I don’t know why. What to call the restaurant where Uncle Kolya surprised the local audience then? Uncle Kolya said that it was “the best restaurant in the Austrian city of Vienna”

1945. Two Soviet officers entered the best restaurant in the Austrian city of Vienna. Winners, they looked around benevolently and calmly at this buzzing gathering: crystal, silver, starched napkins, décolleté and ladies' jewelry. The gypsy wandered between the tables, holding a violin to his ear.

How a tail-coated metro d'hotel, resembling the singer Vertinsky, emerged from the ground.

“Please, please, dears,” he said, squinting his eyes sweetly, in broken Russian.

The officers sat down.

– What will I treat you with? – the head waiter continued in the same language.

The officers looked at each other.

-What do you have? Uncle Kolya asked with a serious cough.

“Oh. We have everything,” answered the Austrian. – Juicy hams, French oysters, tender trout fish - the fruit of mountain streams, bananas from Hong Kong, figs and pears from Italy, pineapples, champagne, whiskey, gin. We have all.

“This can’t be,” Uncle Kolya frowned, and his comrade, the major, a mustachioed, dark-skinned handsome man who conducted counter-propaganda in German throughout the war, lightly tugged at his sleeve: these are our own, these are not Germans, these are Austrians...

“This can’t happen,” repeated Uncle Kolya, who, even without the major, was well versed in the international situation.

“No, that could be the case,” here the head waiter allowed himself to become condescending, because he finally felt at ease. – This can happen, and if this cannot happen, then our chefs will prepare any dish according to your order.

- Shashlik?

- Karski style, on ribs, basturma.

– Daily allowance, green, Ural, with nettles, Ukrainian borscht with pampushki, garlic. A pod of pepper and a shot of vodka.

- Dumplings?

– 50% beef, 30% lamb, 20% pork, onion, pepper, bay leaf. Broth – brain bone with seasonings and herbs, vinegar. Mustard…

- Radish?

- With kvass.

- Pudding?

- With sauce.

- In Beijing.

– IS THE MILK IN THE CARRIER?

“Vertinsky” stopped and sadly wiped his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. He lost the match. And Uncle Kolya went to the kitchen, personally prepared milk in a container and treated it to everyone present.”

The second part of the story is no longer a memoir (or pseudo-memoir) of the author of messages to Ferfichkin, but a description of those historical days when THE ONE WHO WAS (i.e. Brezhnev) died. Thus, the second part of the story describes real historical events, in contrast to the anecdotal situations and anecdotal persons of the first part of the story.

But this description of a real historical event, which became a turning point in two historical eras, is no less original and exotic than in the first part. Turning to history, E. Popov frees himself from pathos. Popov feels that our life is filled with pathos, just to the point of indecency. And first of all, this applies specifically to the last years of Brezhnev’s power: on the streets - banners imbued with pathos, from radios and televisions - fiery speeches pronounced on pieces of paper, the latest news pronounced with pathos in the Vremya program about how much iron and steel there is per capita and much more.

Almost all of life in the last years of Brezhnev's power turned into a semblance. There was no labor, but the pathos of labor was carefully inflated; there was no history, but the pathos of familiarization with “tradition” was cultivated; I was ashamed in front of my ancestors for my own wretched life and history - the more pathos with which these ancestors were found, genealogies and genealogies were compiled, and with pathos they were endowed with special meaning in the found photographs. But there was also another pathos: the pathos of protest, the pathos of confrontation, the pathos of “a cookie in the pocket” of the Russian intelligentsia. Which the intelligentsia was extremely proud of and took credit for. These were dissidents in the kitchen.

For E. Popov, all this pathos covers up emptiness, the absence of any real values; behind this pathos lies lies and falsehood. Moreover, devalued, emasculated values ​​are hidden behind pathos, both in the case of party officialdom and in the case of imaginary intellectual opposition to it. Popov assesses this situation, where lies and falsity are the basis of both the state, official life of a citizen of the Soviet Union, and the private life of the average intellectual, as an absurd situation, as “self-propagating nonsense.” The intelligentsia perfectly sees the emptiness under the official pathos and does not notice that they themselves are imbued with the false pathos of confronting the authorities, because dissident words do not hide real action. They lack will, effective, not verbal heroism.

Therefore, the main character in the second part of E. Popov’s story becomes the Moscow intelligentsia: Moscow bohemia (screenwriters, writers, playwrights, poets, sculptors, artists, etc.).

The author of the story anatomizes the life and thoughts of the Moscow intelligentsia, as well as the life of Evgeniy Anatolyevich Popov, the author of the letters to Ferfichkin. This life proceeds relative to the course of History itself with a capital H. Indeed, Brezhnev's death was perceived as the end of one era and the beginning of another great era.

The death and funeral of THE ONE WHO WAS is perceived by the hero of the story as the beginning of the movement of a big story after many years of its immobility. Moreover, History appears as a magnificent performance, a kind of farce that has not the slightest relation to the everyday life of a private person. But exactly private person flatters himself with the hope that he, too, is capable of joining high history.

The little man of the Soviet state, as S. Chuprinin noted, on the one hand laughed at jokes about the “armor bearer,” and on the other hand, greedily sought to “keep up to date” with Kremlin news and plans, hoping to unravel the logic from indirect, semi-random evidence, the meaning of what was done on behalf of the people.

And this hope is also the result of a person’s long stay in a situation of state lies and falsehood. Because for a long time, Soviet ideology carefully instilled that any person small man in a Soviet country he is a necessary witness to the history taking place before his eyes.

This is the feeling that the Moscow characters of E. Popov’s story live with. He writes about his hero like this: “And the blissful delight of historicity chilled the soul of the patriot...”

Ironizing this blissful delight in the historicity of his heroes, Popov builds his story about days of mourning in Moscow as a “funeral wandering” of its heroes.

E. Popov patiently leads the reader through Moscow in November 1982, approaching the “geographical epicenter of world history,” that is, to the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions, where the farewell to the body of ONE WHO WAS took place. At the same time, as he walks, Popov tells various stories both from my life and from the lives of my friends. And these stories, told on the fly, their volume sarcastically absorbs the plane of what is happening at the “geographical epicenter.”

Absolutely remarkable in this sense is the episode of drinking tea in front of the TV on the day of the funeral of THE ONE WHO WAS.

It is in this episode that the plane of history becomes the plane of the screen. According to S. Chuprinin, the entire episode is projected onto a phrase from Dostoevsky: “Should the light fail, or should I not drink tea?”, which is uttered by one of the characters in Notes from Underground. It must be said here that in “Notes from the Underground” there is also a character named Ferfichkin. Only in Dostoevsky this is a secondary character, but in Popov this figure gives a semantic indication of the plan of the entire story. From this point of view, Popov’s story is the confession of a modern “underground man.” But the confession is in an inverted, travesty form. With Popov, everything is different - both the underground and the underground man.

Here E. Popov develops the idea of ​​​​the alienation of a person, a citizen, from politics and ideology, from the history of his native country.

Moreover, as Chuprinin further writes, the writer is not inclined, as in our fiction and journalism of the stagnant years, to blame everything on the Soviet man himself, who, as if of his own free will, became bourgeois and went underground, hid from the problems and anxieties of the century in a narrow, relatively comfortable a world of official worries, family joys and selfish pleasures.

Chuprinin believes that Popov sees his heroes as egoists and ordinary people against their will, just as Chatsky, Onegin, Pechorin, and Rudin involuntarily turned out to be “superfluous people” in the Nicholas era. Thus, he is an underground man against his will.

But, strange as it may seem, in the story, which ridicules almost everything that touches the eyes of the narrator, there is its own scale of moral values. It turns out that not everything is destroyed by the touch of irony; something unshakable remains, having passed the test of laughter. But these values ​​are not displayed in front of the reader; they need to be calculated from the very behavior of the characters. Moreover, you need to look not so much at what Popov’s characters do, but at what they do not do and will never do. They will not go to serve where they will be deprived of their secret freedom, they will not be friends with those with whom it is beneficial to be friends, they will not say what they do not really think about, they will not adapt to falsehood and meanness. They don't write what they don't want to write, and they won't write what they don't want to write. And it is precisely this inner command that the priest follows in his story: he writes only about what he wants and the way he wants. And this is precisely Popov’s positive program.

Popov puts to the test of laughter, the test of irony, almost all the values ​​that were developed in Soviet times: both false and true values. At one pole of this test is an interest in the “origins”, in our own ancestry, in how and with what our grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived. At the other pole is interest in how and what today’s writers, artists, and artistic bohemians live with.

Andrei Nemzer, who published the article “Unfulfilled. Alternatives to history in the mirror of literature." In it he writes about the works of writers who yearn for a lost historical alternative: “Rommath” Vyach. Pietsukha, “Island of Crimea” by V. Aksenov, “Rosewood” by Sasha Sokolov.