Conversation with a literary scholar and critic Mark Lipovetsky
Introductory remarks by the interviewer, head of the Gefter project “Literature” Evgenia Vezhlyan: Now, in the mid-1990s, the most interesting things are happening not in literature, but with literature itself. In the networked, rhizomatically structured, post-modern society that does not know cultural hierarchies, described by Castells, Urry and other theorists, literature is no longer what it was in the modern era, where, in fact, it acquired its own, until recently seemingly unshakable, features and properties. It is rapidly being marginalized, its contours are changing. Even such fundamental categories as “author” and “reader” require revision, since, thanks to new media, the boundary between the communities of “producers” of literary products and its “consumers” has practically been erased.
In Russia, this constellation is complicated by the fact that the cultural processes launched in the 90s are faced with a counter wave of conservation, archaizing tendencies inspired by the authorities. And sometimes it seems that everything in literature has changed over the past quarter century, and at the same time, nothing has changed. The anachronistic, still Soviet, collides in the literary order with the products of network culture, the phantoms of the romantic worldview of the 19th century collide with activism in the spirit of modern art.
Is it possible, and if so, how, to think of literature now as a whole? In what terms can this be done, given the transformations taking place with it? Or, to put it briefly, what is literature here and now and what happens to it? This is what we talk about with writers, critics, theorists, and literary historians. Not without some long-term calculation, we decided to call our series of conversations about the new literary reality “Definition of the Situation.”
At the beginning of this semester, I read Alexander Ageev’s 1991 article “A Note on the Crisis” with students, because I felt that this old text was the best introduction to the modern literary situation. All, in essence, the problems that were raised by this article continue to be discussed in the modern literary press to this day. And every time - as if newly discovered, just revealed to those discussing. Or here - Prigov. What Prigov did in the 70s and 80s is still perceived as an innovation. That is, literature has not truly assimilated and mastered it. What was new in the early 90s is still new today. And the critics’ bewilderments are the same, and the formulations for them are repeated.
I would like to discuss this effect with you: the record of literature has become significantly stuck. Why? I'm trying to answer this question for myself and I can't.
In the early 90s, when Ageev wrote his article, we all talked about the end of the era of literary centrism. Attitudes to this were very different, some were happy, some were sad... But, as the next almost 25 years showed, no literary centrism ended in Russia. Only it now needs to be understood a little more broadly: not in the sense that literature is the most important of all arts, but as a constant desire for transcendental justifications, transcendental goals both for the whole society and for the individual. human life.
In Russia, this issue, the search for transcendental justifications, was dealt with by literature. The novelty of Prigov lies precisely in the fact that he tried to create a working model of culture in which this focus is absent, or rather, present as a problem, as a boundary, but not as something to which literature or art should be completely subordinated.
Today's political situation once again shows that this seemingly elevated orientation of culture leads to the revival of neo-traditionalist values, which include xenophobia, homophobia, nationalism, and imperialism... All of this, oddly enough, are those very transcendental justifications, only transposed into the political sphere.
But what has changed since 1991? We can confidently say that the alternative type of culture that existed already in the 70s and was associated with the underground nevertheless gave birth to a whole new literature - the literature of a new generation. First of all, most clearly, what was found in underground literature resonated and was reinvented and discovered in poetry, and that is why poetry is so powerful today.
- You’re painting a very rosy picture...
I just didn't finish. Poetry, but what about poetry? From my point of view, there is now a poetry boom in Russia. A poetry boom is when at least a dozen first-class poets are working in Russia at the same time, and at the same time they are at the peak of their form. Several factors must come together. There may be great poets, but they may not be at their peak, they may not resonate with each other - and then there is no boom. A poetic boom occurs when there is such a resonance.
But what's missing from this boom? The broad masses of readers that have always accompanied this boom are missing. True, I once listened to a report by Stanislav Lvovsky, one of the leading poets of the new generation, who was analyzing the degree of readership success of, say, poetry of the 60s and proving with numbers that it was greatly exaggerated and heavily mythologized. But, nevertheless, he was there.
On the other hand, we can say that wherever the poets of the new galaxy perform - Barskova, Lvovsky, Stepanova, Fanailova and other poets of this circle - the audience is full. True, these are university auditoriums, and not stadiums.
- Do you mean in America, for example?
No, everywhere, in Russia too, when they perform in “Order of Words” or in Moscow clubs, audiences gather, they don’t have empty halls, they have readers. It’s just that, of course, this reader is not a mass reader, not the same reader who votes for Putin. The notorious 86% read some other literature, and this literature constitutes the mainstream, which (returning to the conversation we started) suits the mass reader precisely because of its obvious or hidden transcendental orientation.
Literature, which consciously refuses to search for transcendental justifications, goes against the reader's expectations and requires a certain intellectual preparation. However, the last criterion does not seem very significant to me, because, for example, in the 70s it was difficult to imagine Brodsky’s mass readers, but today Brodsky, in terms of mass audience, is almost the same as Yevtushenko in the 60s. The complexity of new poetry is a passing factor, and I would not be surprised if in 10 years they will say about the poetry of Maria Stepanova “transparent, like a tear”...
...In a word, what happened in the underground did not disappear and was continued, but not throughout the entire cultural field, and this is surprisingly symmetrical to the political situation that we are all observing.
Actually, yes, that is, it is approximately in tune with my thoughts and considerations. It seems to me that, in addition to the illusion of the end of literary centrism, in the 90s it also seemed that the underground, that is, those who were, relatively speaking, marginalized, were demarginalized, became the establishment... And this again is very similar to the political situation. It turns out, according to Bourdieu, a homology between the field of literature and the field of power... At some point, there was a feeling that the goals that some “we” (Westerners, liberals) had historically set for themselves had been achieved.
But in 2013 you wrote an article “The Landscape Before”, in which you describe completely opposite processes: the feeling that “we” almost won has dissolved somewhere, gone away. Regarding politics, we will have some ready-made answers there, but what happened in literature?
I don't think there was a sense of triumphalism in the 90s. I remember how the critic Lev Anninsky complained that if in the 70s he wrote an article and it was published in Litgazeta, then he became popular like a pop star. And now he can write whatever he wants, but no one will read it.
Liberal (in the broad sense) literature lived precisely because of its hidden or obvious political urgency, and when its entire agenda was implemented to one degree or another, a feeling arose that “we” were out of work, “we” were not needed by anyone. For example, thick magazines survived in the 90s only thanks to Soros, who provided them with library subscriptions. In general, if we talk about thick magazines, they missed some very important point, for some reason deciding that they should act as a preservative enzyme for literature. But they did not understand that this preservative enzyme is mass culture, which was generally perceived at that time as an anti-cultural phenomenon. As it seems now, this idea is erroneous: popular culture or simply the mainstream is the “fixer” of the process. This is the cultural rear where those models who have already proven themselves at the forefront sail. Who would have said 30 years ago that Dina Rubina would sell in mass quantities? She was perceived as the author of emigrant women's prose, and this is a rather narrow segment of the market. And suddenly Dina Rubina is a phenomenon of mass culture. Also balancing on the border of mass culture are, say, Tatyana Tolstaya or Ulitskaya, who until quite recently were perceived as completely experimental authors.
Magazines turned out to be a more aesthetically perfect (although this very criterion now seems quite dubious to me) stand-in for mass culture. Moreover, the understudy is unsuccessful, precisely because the position where what is already known, already established is reproduced, has already been occupied in modern culture. Magazines should become the place where the most acute, the most risky, the most scandalous search takes place.
This search began to occur in small magazines, some of them rose, some of them disappeared, but, of course, it is a huge omission that this search practically disappeared on the platforms of large magazines.
Are you saying that thick magazines, nevertheless, retained their main function - to be the institutional core, the backbone of the literary process?
No, they lost it, in my opinion. The backbone of literature has become what is sold in book supermarkets, and what is sold in book supermarkets, as it turns out, is not particularly different from what is published in thick magazines. And if this difference does not exist, then what is the unique cultural function of magazines? As a writer who grew up in the world of thick magazines, this is very painful for me to watch.
We seem to have wandered away from the question I posed. Why is our literature not moving anywhere, revolving around the same issues?
From my point of view, the reason is that - not in literature itself, but in its institutions (such as thick magazines) - there has been no change literary generations. The generation that was at the forefront of literature in the late 80s had to understand that you can’t print the same thing that they thought was interesting 10, and now 20 years ago, and you can’t trust your taste, because taste is cultural -a historical construct and there is no absolute criterion of taste. And it was necessary to trust people whose tastes were not close, it was necessary to make alliances with those who seemed wrong, not aesthetically perfect enough, for example, or even simply give way to them. And if this had happened, the field of modern Russian literature might have looked different.
But the presence of a mainstream in literature is still socially significant. It is important from an “external” point of view... That is, one that is not biased by a certain position - the position of a “player” on the literary field, who does not at all consider phenomena that do not correspond to his taste.
This is important, of course, but how is the mainstream formed simply from an aesthetic point of view? The mainstream is formed through an always fluid combination of the recognizable and the new, that is, through the recycling of familiar models and some of their shift. What channels exist in the literary field for this?
The "player position" you're talking about is the ideal position of a magazine editor-in-chief. Now, looking at the thick magazine text, it is impossible to say where it was published - in “October”, “New World”, “Znamya” or “Friendship of Peoples”? The difference between their aesthetic, ideological, political, whatever position is so minimal, so intangible, that it no longer matters. And this completely contradicts the idea of the magazine. The magazine must have a line, both political and aesthetic. A magazine must afford things that a sales-dependent publisher cannot afford.
- So a magazine is a more radical institution than a publishing house?
And moreover, in Russia, after all, thick magazines are truly an institution. Behind it lies not only an intangible tradition, but also a very real cultural inertia - the habit of intellectuals of several generations to follow what appears in magazines. And this is an invaluable category, even in market terms. And this institutional inertia was lost. This problem is part of the systemic crisis we are talking about.
Of course, we must admit that the Internet provides a new twist to the plot. Perhaps a magazine in the old sense is no longer needed. The author's journal is enough social networks. We all follow our favorite poets on Facebook and receive their new poems in real time.
In the article “The Landscape Before” that you mentioned, I wrote about the coming division between literature that strives for “simplicity” and literature that I called “complex.” So, this simplicity is necessarily associated with neo-traditionalism. And the forecast was completely justified: those writers who gravitate toward the pole of simplicity found themselves in a general camp that is not politically close to us.
- Is the combination of the traditionalist model of literature and conservative politics mandatory?
I think not. There are many exceptions. Although this often happens, fortunately, we are not dealing with molecules, but with living people. For me personally, what was especially dramatic was that many writers whom we considered experimenters found themselves politically again in the conservative camp.
This is due to the fact that until 2014 and even until the 11th year, liberalism was defined by the attitude towards Stalin, towards nationalism, towards the West in a widely accepted sense, but not, for example, towards gays, gender problems, the problems of migrants or the place of religion in modern culture (many liberals quite sincerely associated themselves with religion, moreover, in late Soviet times it was a gesture of opposition).
After 11-12 years, after the dispersal of the protest movement, all these seemingly purely cultural, cultural-psychological values acquired acute political meaning and became points of demarcation. This division, of course, also affected literature. I emphasize this because one of the illusions of, say, the underground was that literature could be an apolitical art.
Moreover, it was a rather aggressive illusion, just like the illusion that we do not need a reader, we are valuable in ourselves.
In the 70s, this apoliticality had a political meaning, precisely because the dominant ideology required the writer to take an active political position, that is, loyalty. And this means that the refusal to be political was a gesture of open nonconformism.
But today literature is connected with politics, precisely because, as you said, according to Bourdieu, literature discusses the issue of symbolic power and is itself a field of struggle for symbolic power. All Russian politics, as usual, revolves around symbolic values. At least in Russian politics of the last five years, the symbolic clearly dominates the pragmatic: anything from arrest Pussy Riot to the seizure of Crimea and the war in Ukraine, from St. George's ribbons to the concert in Palmyra - everything is motivated precisely by symbolic values. This, in fact, is the literary centrism of modern Russian society - what we started the conversation with.
-...When this whole story with Crimea was going on, people appeared who began to talk about how they vacationed in Crimea, what sentimental values they had associated with Crimea and how this cannot be taken away from them... This is how very real political actions with with all their wide-ranging consequences. And whatever we take on, whatever we grab onto, we will see that in Russian politics of recent years, no matter how funny it may seem, there is a lack of pragmatics, but with an excess of symbolism. Those showdowns that take place in literature are most directly related to politics because politics is carried out precisely on this symbolic field.
But in fact, the resource of symbolic power that politics can use and which works very well and has been tested is not literature, but the media. How can modern Russian literature, the demand for which is negligible, be such a resource?
We are not talking about the impact of literature on the reader: this impact actually occurs mainly through “TV.” It's about homology, as you yourself said, referring to Bourdieu: what happens in literature really reflects quite accurately what happens in society.
Reflects, but does not influence... Isn’t this the uniqueness of the modern literary situation? Was there this influence before?
Well, this is also a controversial thesis.
- I mean the classical model, the times of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev.
It was an impact on the educated class, and only the educated class.
- But it was the educated class that was the class that makes decisions. What now?
Nowadays the educated class hardly reads modern literature, but that doesn’t matter. I'm talking about something else. The homology lies in the fact that literature is almost a laboratory, a scientific institute in which those same values are tested for stability, which then, in exactly the same set, spill out into the media, and there they begin to broadcast and strengthen themselves.
Literature in this sense is a model that exists parallel to society, but is active and somehow connected with it. Therefore, by studying literature, we can predict certain things. Another thing is that previously the impact of this model on society occurred directly, but now it is mediated through media channels. But I'm not sure that it "used to be" like that.
Another thing is that in Russia political changes are carried out by a very thin layer of the elite, but then what the masses read and whether they read does not matter either.
Let's try to put together a picture as it emerges from our conversation. Firstly, literature does not really influence anyone and cannot influence anyone. Secondly, Russia, as it was a literature-centric country, generally remains so.
I say again, literary-centricity in this case is an expansive concept simply for lack of another term; literary-centricity in this case is simply a manifestation of a constant orientation towards the symbolic and transcendental.
And thirdly, despite the first two points (or vice versa, in continuation of them), our party and government are ready to invest efforts and resources in literature, as demonstrated by the past “Year of Literature”... What do you think symbolic meaning this promotion? Does he exist? What should you pay special attention to here?
These government literary events cover literature quite widely, not excluding the former underground. The lists of names captured in the orbit of official “celebrations” include Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, and Mandelstam... That is, the so-called state channel of Russian literature has clearly been expanded to include those who were excluded in Soviet times. And Akhmatova, of course.
- We remember the emblem of the “Year of Literature”.
I see here two, if not goals, then underlying reasons, let’s say. First, the state declares itself to be a promoter and sponsor of literature, which has already become a resource of neo-traditionalism, despite its inclusion in the new canon of modernists. But the modernists are from among the neoclassicals. Neither Kharms, nor Khlebnikov, nor Prigov found a place in this canon.
- For example, Mandelstam - we cannot say in any way that this is a traditionalist poetic strategy.
Neoclassicism, no need to be coarse, it was neoclassicism, this is exactly how it was perceived in the 20s and 30s... It is interesting that with the exception of Mayakovsky, who, if present, is only due to the inertia coming from the Soviet school curriculum, the avant-garde in this new canon minimized. IN fine arts not so, of course, after all, in the fine arts there is no escape from Malevich, and it is clear that the avant-garde is the most expensive thing that is on the Russian market.
- Here truly symbolic capital turns into material capital.
Of course this plays a role. But in literature it was always very bad with avant-garde artists. They are not allowed into this canon precisely because they are associated with the revolutionary heritage, because everything is avant-garde - constant rebellion, protest, undermining all kinds of traditional systems and values. Vanguard clearly does not fit into the system. This new “neotraditionalism” in this case supported the authority of literature.
On the other hand, the current government is very concerned about its image - much more than even in Soviet times, in which they also cared about these things.
- This is connected with the symbolic dominant that you spoke about.
Of course. Therefore, concern for literature becomes part of this image: we do not pursue literature, but research, support, feed. Where else is there a state program for the development of literature, where else does the president speak out about what works should or should not be read in high school? But in Russia this is a political issue.
And this also cannot be discounted. And in the 20s, and in the 30s, and in the 70s, the authorities very actively bribed writers, bribed not only literally - with high fees - but also with opportunities, publications, trips, access to what was otherwise inaccessible, and a writer, as we know, is a vulnerable, vain person, susceptible to flattery, and in general this is not such a difficult prey. If Khrushchev had made Solzhenitsyn chairman of the Lenin Prize committee, perhaps the latter’s life would have turned out differently. I won’t say it’s better, and it’s not a fact that Solzhenitsyn would agree.
The authorities continue to engage in this “purchase” of the writer, promoting loyal writers and loyalist strategies?
Of course, this should not be discounted. The implicit politicization of literature is becoming more and more explicit. And these trends will intensify.
Now, if you want to be an active figure on the literary field, will you have to declare your political position in one declarative form or another?
- ...And work with real political values and problems. But I do not, of course, urge anyone to write propaganda, under no circumstances. But both Nabokov and Mandelstam were deeply political writers, that is, they thought politically and then expressed this in a system of images and ideas that was organically close to them. And those who switched to direct political language either died or broke down and lost themselves. That is, today, it seems to me, the main problem is How politics will express itself through literature. And it is precisely the problematization of the transcendental paradigm that, in my understanding, is the only way to jump out of the vicious circle of problems and situations, to avoid repeating what has already happened to literature in our history.
The modern literary situation can be characterized in several ways: 1) due to the specifics of the literary twentieth century, when the field of literature was often combined with the field of power, part of modern literature, especially in the first post-perestroika decade, became the so-called “returned” literature (in the 80-90- e years, E. Zamyatin’s novel “We”, M. Bulgakov’s story “Heart of a Dog”, A. Akhmatova’s “Requiem” and many other texts returned to the reader. 2) the entry into literature of new themes, characters, stage venues (for example, a madhouse as the habitat of the heroes of V. Erofeev’s play “Walpurgis Night, or the Commander’s Steps”); 3) development of prose; 4) coexistence of three artistic methods: realism, modernism, postmodernism. A special place is occupied by women's prose - prose written by a woman about a woman. The most striking name in the history of women's prose is Victoria Tokareva. Postmodernism as a method of modern literature is most in tune with the feelings of the end of the twentieth century and echoes the achievements of modern civilization - the advent of computers, the birth of “virtual reality”. Postmodernism is characterized by: 1) the idea of the world as a total chaos that does not imply a norm; 2) understanding of reality as fundamentally inauthentic, simulated; 3) the absence of all hierarchies and value positions; 4) the idea of the world as a text consisting of exhausted words; 5) non-distinction between one’s own and someone else’s word, total quotation; 6) the use of collage and montage techniques when creating a text. In Russian postmodernism, several directions can be distinguished: 1) social art - replaying Soviet clichés and stereotypes, revealing their absurdity (V. Sorokin “Queue”); 2) conceptualism - the denial of all conceptual schemes, understanding the world as a text (V. Narbikova “Plan of the first person. And the second”); 3) fantasy, which differs from science fiction in that a fictional situation is presented as real (V. Pelevin “Omon Ra”); 4) remake - reworking classic plots, revealing semantic gaps in them (B. Akunin “The Seagull”); 5) surrealism is proof of the endless absurdity of the world (Yu. Mamleev “Jump into the Coffin”). Modern dramaturgy largely takes into account the positions of postmodernity. For example, in the play “Wonderful Woman” by N. Sadur, an image of a simulated reality is created, posing as the 80s. XX century. The heroine, Lidia Petrovna, who met a woman named Ubienko in a potato field, receives the right to see the world of the earth - terrible and chaotic, but can no longer leave the field of death. Literature, like any other form of art, never stands still, constantly being in the process of self-development and self-improvement. Each historical era was distinguished by its own literary genres, trends and styles, characteristic of a given stage of human development. The Internet network, which distributes books in electronic form, is of great importance for modern literature. “Paper” literature has not outlived its usefulness, but widespread use e-books and other means, they created another, more convenient version of the book, which you can carry with you everywhere and which does not take up much space in your bag. The main works remain in the genres of postmodernism, realism, and modernism. Representatives of postmodern literature are: L. Gabyshev, Z. Gareev, S. Kaledin, L. Petrushevskaya, A. Kabakov, E. Popov, V. Pietsukh. Separately, it should be noted the literature of the Russian underground, one of the brightest representatives of which was Ven. Erofeev with his story “Moscow - Petushki”. In the foreground are the writers V. Erofeev, Z. Gareev, V. Narbikova, T. Kibirov, L. Rubinstein, L. Petrushevskaya. Works by V. Pelevin are published. Readers' views are turned to postmodern literature (D. Galkovsky, A. Korolev, A. Borodyne, Z. Goreev). Currently, memoirs and popular literature are very popular in Russia. Everyone knows the authors V. Dotsenko, A. Marinina, D. Dontsova. A special direction of “glamorous literature”, or “ruble” literature, is being formed. It shows the life and value system of a whole class of very rich and famous people, which has formed in Russia over the past 15 years.
2. Features of letters. process of the late 1980s and early 90s. The concept of “modern literature” and “modern literary process”.
Modern literature is literature from the turn of the century; it has features for the transitional period. Memoirs, memoirs, diaries are becoming popular. Prospects for the development of literature in the 21st century are outlined. If earlier literature developed gradually, one thing replaced the other, then at this time everything develops at once. We can distinguish 3 periods of modern literature: 1) the end of the 80s, 2) the 90s, 3) 2000 (zeros). 1 is characterized by a reaction to the collapse of the old system and the destruction of ideas about literature, characteristic of Russian culture, as embodiments of the highest truth. Solzhenitsyn, Platonov, Akhmatova, Buglakov came to the reader in their entirety. Beginning Accusatory literature or literature of social pathos, exposing everything and everyone. There is tough prose, note: “Stroibat” by Karedin. The concept of modern literature and modern literature. process are not the same. For the 2nd – Special shift period artistic systems . It's the turn of the century. Time to sum up. The rise of postmodernism. The role of the reader is increasing. For the 3rd – Creation of many author’s genre forms: interaction of mass and serious literature (post-modernism); the creativity of women writers is optimized. Modern literature gathers its creative forces, accumulates experience of self- and re-evaluation: the role of magazines and criticism is high, many new names appear, creative groups coexist, manifestos, new magazines, almanacs are published. All this happened both at the beginning and at the end of the century - the circle is closed - the life of new literature lies ahead. The literary diversity of modernity, its diversity, cannot be assessed unambiguously and tendentiously, indicating a possible way out of the crisis. The creative epicenter of prose is the spiritual self-awareness of the world and man. The spirituality of prose is connected to the whole world order, in contrast to the impressionistic mosaic of experiencing the world in lyrics. The classical tradition of spirituality of Russian literature, which meets “all the needs of the human spirit, all the highest aspirations of man to understand and appreciate the world around him,” has not lost its role, despite all the changes in the 80s-90s. Literature participates in the historical creation of life, reveals the spiritual self-awareness of time, influencing the sensual and volitional attitude towards the world. The result of the spiritual worldview of the era is a feeling of chaos, turmoil, devastating confusion of “powerlessness and helplessness,” when, in the words of I. Dedkov, “nothing depends on you anymore.” The work of new authors of the 90s - A. Varlamov, O. Pavlov, A. Dmitriev, T. Nabatnikova, V. Shishkin - is characterized by attention to history and individual human destiny, asserting new, far from exhausted possibilities of realism. The heroes of their works - “The Loch”, “The End of the Century”, “Turn of the River”, “One Night Awaits Everyone” - are increasingly experiencing a world in the presence of death, a premonition of the Apocalypse, a gaping emptiness of the meaning of existence. The world of personal destinies does not coincide with the social activity of the time and retains the inertia of alienation and non-participation. The crisis of spiritual identification of society and the individual, stated in the work of M. Kuraev “Mirror of Montachka”, and in the article by N. Ivanova, is associated with the loss of one’s reflection - the face / the conventionally fantastic plot line reveals the story of the residents of a communal apartment who have lost the ability to self-reflect in mirrors, they are captive to the bustle of life, life-survival, as if in an unreal nightmare. “The prose of disaster” is a meta-plot of “spiritual timelessness,” according to N. Ivanova. History and time send new tests to the Spirit, prose reveals only their consonance, what becomes a common destiny, grows to the degree of spiritualized self-awareness of life.
The main stylistic trends in the literature of modern and contemporary times
This section of the manual does not pretend to be comprehensive or thorough. Many directions from a historical and literary point of view are not yet known to students, others are little known. Any detailed conversation about literary trends in this situation is generally impossible. Therefore, it seems rational to give only the most general information, primarily characterizing style dominants one direction or another.
Baroque
The Baroque style became widespread in European (to a lesser extent Russian) culture in the 16th–17th centuries. It is based on two main processes: On the one side, crisis of revivalist ideals, crisis of idea titanism(when a person was thought of as a huge figure, a demigod), on the other - a sharp contrasting man as a creator with the impersonal natural world. Baroque is a very complex and contradictory movement. Even the term itself does not have an unambiguous interpretation. The Italian root contains the meaning of excess, depravity, error. It is not very clear whether this was a negative characteristic of the Baroque “from outside” this style (primarily referring to assessments Baroque writers of the era of classicism) or is it a self-irony reflection of the Baroque authors themselves.
The Baroque style is characterized by a combination of the incongruous: on the one hand, an interest in exquisite forms, paradoxes, sophisticated metaphors and allegories, oxymorons, and verbal play, and on the other, deep tragedy and a sense of doom.
For example, in Gryphius’s baroque tragedy, Eternity itself could appear on stage and comment with bitter irony on the suffering of the heroes.
On the other hand, the flourishing of the still life genre is associated with the Baroque era, where luxury, beauty of forms, and richness of colors are aestheticized. However, the Baroque still life is also contradictory: bouquets, brilliant in color and technique, vases with fruit, and next to it is the classic Baroque still life “Vanity of Vanities” with the obligatory hourglass (an allegory of the passing time of life) and a skull – an allegory of inevitable death.
Baroque poetry is characterized by sophistication of forms, a fusion of visual and graphic series, when verse was not only written, but also “drawn.” Suffice it to recall the poem “Hourglass” by I. Gelwig, which we talked about in the chapter “Poetry”. And there were much more complex forms.
In the Baroque era, exquisite genres became widespread: rondos, madrigals, sonnets, odes of strict form, etc.
The works of the most prominent representatives of the Baroque (Spanish playwright P. Calderon, German poet and playwright A. Gryphius, German mystic poet A. Silesius, etc.) were included in the golden fund of world literature. The paradoxical lines of Silesius are often perceived as famous aphorisms: “I am great as God. God is as insignificant as I am.”
Many of the discoveries of Baroque poets, thoroughly forgotten in the 18th–19th centuries, were adopted in the verbal experiments of 20th century writers.
Classicism
Classicism is a movement in literature and art that historically replaced Baroque. The era of classicism lasted more than one hundred and fifty years - from the mid-17th to the beginning of the 19th century.
Classicism is based on the idea of rationality, orderliness of the world . Man is understood as, first of all, a rational being, and human society is understood as a rationally organized mechanism.
Exactly the same work of art must be built on the basis of strict canons, structurally repeating the rationality and orderliness of the universe.
Classicism recognized Antiquity as the highest manifestation of spirituality and culture, therefore ancient art was considered a role model and an indisputable authority.
Characteristic of classicism pyramidal consciousness, that is, in every phenomenon, the artists of classicism sought to see a rational center, which was recognized as the top of the pyramid and personified the entire building. For example, in their understanding of the state, the classicists proceeded from the idea of a reasonable monarchy - useful and necessary for all citizens.
Man in the era of classicism is interpreted primarily as a function, as a link in the rational pyramid of the universe. The inner world of a person in classicism is less actualized; external actions are more important. For example, an ideal monarch is one who strengthens the state, takes care of its welfare and enlightenment. Everything else fades into the background. That is why Russian classicists idealized the figure of Peter I, not attaching importance to the fact that he was a very complex and not at all attractive person.
In the literature of classicism, a person was thought of as the bearer of some important idea that determined his essence. That is why in the comedies of classicism “speaking surnames” were often used, immediately determining the logic of the character. Let us remember, for example, Mrs. Prostakova, Skotinin or Pravdin in Fonvizin’s comedy. These traditions are clearly visible in Griboedov’s “Woe from Wit” (Molchalin, Skalozub, Tugoukhovsky, etc.).
From the Baroque era, classicism inherited an interest in emblematicity, when a thing became a sign of an idea, and the idea was embodied in a thing. For example, a portrait of a writer involved depicting “things” that confirm his literary merits: the books he wrote, and sometimes the characters he created. Thus, the monument to I. A. Krylov, created by P. Klodt, depicts the famous fabulist surrounded by the heroes of his fables. The entire pedestal is decorated with scenes from Krylov’s works, thereby clearly confirming that how the author's fame is founded. Although the monument was created after the era of classicism, it is the classical traditions that are clearly visible here.
The rationality, clarity and emblematic nature of the culture of classicism also gave rise to a unique solution to conflicts. In the eternal conflict of reason and feeling, feeling and duty, so beloved by the authors of classicism, feeling was ultimately defeated.
Classicism sets (primarily thanks to the authority of its main theorist N. Boileau) strict hierarchy of genres , which are divided into high (ode, tragedy, epic) and low ( comedy, satire, fable). Each genre has certain characteristics and is written only in its own style. Mixing styles and genres is strictly prohibited.
Everyone knows the famous thing from school rule of three formulated for classical drama: unity places(all the action in one place), time(action from sunrise to nightfall), actions(the play has one central conflict into which all the characters are drawn).
In terms of genre, classicism preferred tragedy and ode. True, after the brilliant comedies of Moliere, the comedy genres also became very popular.
Classicism gave the world a whole galaxy of talented poets and playwrights. Corneille, Racine, Moliere, La Fontaine, Voltaire, Swift - these are just some of the names from this brilliant galaxy.
In Russia, classicism developed somewhat later, already in the 18th century. Russian literature also owes a lot to classicism. It is enough to recall the names of D. I. Fonvizin, A. P. Sumarokov, M. V. Lomonosov, G. R. Derzhavin.
Sentimentalism
Sentimentalism arose in European culture in the middle of the 18th century, its first signs began to appear among English and a little later among French writers in the late 1720s; by the 1740s, the direction had already taken shape. Although the term “sentimentalism” itself appeared much later and was associated with the popularity of Lorenz Stern’s novel “A Sentimental Journey” (1768), the hero of which travels through France and Italy, finds himself in many sometimes funny, sometimes touching situations and understands that there are “noble joys” and noble anxieties beyond one’s personality.”
Sentimentalism existed for quite a long time in parallel with classicism, although in essence it was built on completely different foundations. For sentimentalist writers, the main value is the world of feelings and experiences. At first, this world is perceived quite narrowly, writers sympathize with the love suffering of heroines (such, for example, are the novels of S. Richardson, if we remember, Pushkin’s favorite author Tatyana Larina).
An important merit of sentimentalism was its interest in the inner life of an ordinary person. The “average” person was of little interest in classicism, but sentimentalism, on the contrary, emphasized the depth of feelings of a very ordinary, from a social point of view, heroine.
Thus, S. Richardson’s maid Pamela demonstrates not only purity of feeling, but also moral virtues: honor and pride, which ultimately leads to a happy ending; and the famous Clarissa, the heroine of the novel with a long and rather funny title from a modern point of view, although she belongs to a wealthy family, is still not a noblewoman. At the same time, her evil genius and insidious seducer Robert Loveless is a socialite, an aristocrat. In Russia at the end of the 18th century - at the beginning of the 19th century, the surname Loveless (hinting at “love less” - deprived of love) was pronounced in the French manner of “Lovelace”, since then the word “Lovelace” has become a common noun, denoting red tape and a ladies' man.
If Richardson's novels were devoid of philosophical depth, didactic and slightly naive, then a little later in sentimentalism the opposition “natural man - civilization” began to take shape, where, unlike the Baroque, civilization was understood as evil. This revolution was finally formalized in the work of the famous French writer and philosopher J. J. Rousseau.
His novel “Julia, or the New Heloise,” which conquered Europe in the 18th century, is much more complex and less straightforward. The struggle of feelings, social conventions, sin and virtues are intertwined here into one ball. The title itself (“New Heloise”) contains a reference to the semi-legendary mad passion of the medieval thinker Pierre Abelard and his student Heloise (11th–12th centuries), although the plot of Rousseau’s novel is original and does not reproduce the legend of Abelard.
Even more important was the philosophy of “natural man” formulated by Rousseau and which still retains a living meaning. Rousseau considered civilization the enemy of man, killing all the best in him. From here interest in nature, natural feelings and natural behavior. These ideas of Rousseau received special development in the culture of romanticism and - later - in numerous works of art of the 20th century (for example, in “Oles” by A. I. Kuprin).
In Russia, sentimentalism appeared later and did not bring serious world discoveries. Mostly Western European subjects were “Russified”. At the same time, he had a great influence on the further development of Russian literature itself.
The most famous work of Russian sentimentalism was “Poor Liza” by N. M. Karamzin (1792), which had a huge success and caused countless imitations.
“Poor Liza”, in fact, reproduces on Russian soil the plot and aesthetic findings of English sentimentalism of the time of S. Richardson, however, for Russian literature the idea that “even peasant women can feel” became a discovery that largely determined its further development.
Romanticism
Romanticism as a dominant literary movement in European and Russian literature did not exist for very long - about thirty years, but its influence on world culture was colossal.
Historically, romanticism is associated with the unfulfilled hopes of the Great french revolution(1789–1793), however, this connection is not linear; romanticism was prepared by the entire course of aesthetic development in Europe, which was gradually formed by a new concept of man.
The first associations of romantics appeared in Germany at the end of the 18th century; a few years later, romanticism developed in England and France, then in the USA and Russia.
Being a “world style,” romanticism is a very complex and contradictory phenomenon, uniting many schools and multidirectional artistic quests. Therefore, it is very difficult to reduce the aesthetics of romanticism to any single and clear foundations.
At the same time, the aesthetics of romanticism undoubtedly represents a unity when compared with classicism or the later critical realism. This unity is due to several main factors.
Firstly, Romanticism recognized the value of the human personality as such, its self-sufficiency. The world of feelings and thoughts of an individual person was recognized as the highest value. This immediately changed the coordinate system; in the “individual – society” opposition, the emphasis shifted towards the individual. Hence the cult of freedom, characteristic of the romantics.
Secondly, Romanticism further emphasized the confrontation between civilization and nature, giving preference to the natural elements. It is no coincidence that precisely in the eraRomanticism gave rise to tourism, a cult of picnics in nature, etc. At the level of literary themes, there is an interest in exotic landscapes, scenes from rural life, and “savage” cultures. Civilization often seems like a “prison” for a free individual. This plot can be traced, for example, in “Mtsyri” by M. Yu. Lermontov.
Thirdly, the most important feature of the aesthetics of romanticism was two worlds: recognition that the social world we are accustomed to is not the only and genuine one; the genuine human world must be sought somewhere other than here. This is where the idea comes from beautiful "there"– fundamental to the aesthetics of romanticism. This “there” can manifest itself in very different ways: in Divine grace, as in W. Blake; in the idealization of the past (hence the interest in legends, the appearance of numerous literary fairy tales, the cult of folklore); in interest in unusual personalities, high passions (hence the cult of the noble robber, interest in stories about “fatal love,” etc.).
Duality should not be interpreted naively . The Romantics were not at all people “not of this world,” as, unfortunately, it is sometimes imagined by young philologists. They took an active part participation in social life, and the greatest poet I. Goethe, closely associated with romanticism, was not only a major natural scientist, but also a prime minister. This is not about a style of behavior, but about a philosophical attitude, about an attempt to look beyond the limits of reality.
Fourthly, a significant role in the aesthetics of romanticism played demonism, based on doubt about the sinlessness of God, on aestheticization riot. Demonism was not a necessary basis for the romantic worldview, but it formed the characteristic background of romanticism. The philosophical and aesthetic justification for demonism was the mystical tragedy (the author called it “mystery”) of J. Byron “Cain” (1821), where the biblical story about Cain is reinterpreted, and Divine truths are disputed. Interest in the “demonic principle” in man is characteristic of the most different artists era of romanticism: J. Byron, P. B. Shelley, E. Poe, M. Yu. Lermontov and others.
Romanticism brought with it a new genre palette. Classical tragedies and odes were replaced by elegies, romantic dramas, and poems. A real breakthrough occurred in prose genres: many short stories appear, the novel looks completely new. The plot scheme becomes more complicated: paradoxical plot moves, fatal secrets, and unexpected endings are popular. Victor Hugo became an outstanding master of the romantic novel. His novel “Notre Dame de Paris” (1831) is worldwide famous masterpiece romantic prose. Hugo's later novels (The Man Who Laughs, Les Misérables, etc.) are characterized by a synthesis of romantic and realistic tendencies, although the writer remained faithful to romantic foundations all his life.
Having opened the world of a specific personality, romanticism, however, did not seek to detail individual psychology. Interest in “superpassions” led to the typification of experiences. If it’s love, then it’s for centuries, if it’s hate, then it’s to the end. Most often, the romantic hero was the bearer of one passion, one idea. This brought the romantic hero closer to the hero of classicism, although all the accents were placed differently. Genuine psychologism, “dialectics of the soul” became the discoveries of another aesthetic system - realism.
Realism
Realism is a very complex and voluminous concept. As a dominant historical and literary direction, it was formed in the 30s of the 19th century, but as a way of mastering reality, realism was initially inherent in artistic creativity. Many features of realism appeared already in folklore; they were characteristic of ancient art, the art of the Renaissance, classicism, sentimentalism, etc. This “end-to-end” character of realism has been repeatedly noted by specialists, and the temptation has repeatedly arisen to see the history of the development of art as an oscillation between the mystical (romantic) and realistic ways of understanding reality. In its most complete form, this was reflected in the theory of the famous philologist D.I. Chizhevsky (Ukrainian by origin, he lived most of his life in Germany and the USA), who represented the development of world literature as a “pendulummovement" between the realistic and mystical poles. In aesthetic theory this is called "Chizhevsky pendulum". Each way of reflecting reality is characterized by Chizhevsky for several reasons:
|
realistic |
romantic (mystical) |
|
Portrayal of a typical hero in typical circumstances |
Portraying an exceptional hero in exceptional circumstances |
|
Recreation of reality, its plausible image |
Active re-creation of reality under the sign of the author's ideal |
|
Image of a person in diverse social, everyday and psychological connections with the outside world |
The self-worth of the individual, emphasizing his independence from society, conditions and environment |
|
Creating the character of the hero as multifaceted, ambiguous, internally contradictory |
Describing the hero with one or two bright, characteristic, prominent features, fragmentarily |
|
Searching for ways to resolve the hero’s conflict with the world in real, concrete historical reality |
Searching for ways to resolve the hero’s conflict with the world in other, transcendental, cosmic spheres |
|
Concrete historical chronotope (certain space, specific time) |
Conditional, extremely generalized chronotope (indefinite space, indefinite time) |
|
Motivation of the hero's behavior by the features of reality |
Depiction of the hero's behavior as not motivated by reality (self-determination of personality) |
|
Conflict resolution and successful outcome are considered achievable |
The insolubility of the conflict, the impossibility or conditional nature of a successful outcome |
Chizhevsky’s scheme, created many decades ago, is still quite popular today, at the same time it significantly straightens the literary process. Thus, classicism and realism turn out to be typologically similar, and romanticism actually reproduces Baroque culture. In fact, these are completely different models, and the realism of the 19th century bears little resemblance to the realism of the Renaissance, much less to classicism. At the same time, Chizhevsky’s scheme is useful to remember, since some accents are placed precisely.
If we talk about classical realism of the 19th century, then several main points should be highlighted.
In realism, there was a rapprochement between the depicter and the depicted. The subject of the image, as a rule, was the reality “here and now.” It is no coincidence that the history of Russian realism is connected with the formation of the so-called “natural school,” which saw its task as giving as objective a picture of modern reality as possible. True, this extreme specificity soon ceased to satisfy writers, and the most significant authors (I. S. Turgenev, N. A. Nekrasov, A. N. Ostrovsky, etc.) went far beyond the aesthetics of the “natural school.”
At the same time, one should not think that realism has abandoned the formulation and solution of “eternal questions of existence.” On the contrary, major realist writers posed precisely these questions above all. However, the most important problems human existence projected onto concrete reality, onto the lives of ordinary people. Thus, F. M. Dostoevsky solves the eternal problem of the relationship between man and God not in symbolic images Cain and Lucifer, such as Byron, and the example of the fate of the beggar student Raskolnikov, who killed the old pawnbroker and thereby “crossed the line.”
Realism does not abandon symbolic and allegorical images, but their meaning changes; they highlight not eternal problems, but socially specific ones. For example, the tales of Saltykov-Shchedrin are allegorical through and through, but the social reality of the 19th century is recognizable in them.
Realism, like no previously existing direction, interested in the inner world of an individual, strives to see its paradoxes, movement and development. In this regard, in the prose of realism, the role of internal monologues increases; the hero constantly argues with himself, doubts himself, and evaluates himself. Psychologism in the works of realist masters(F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy, etc.) reaches the highest expressiveness.
Realism changes over time, reflecting new realities and historical trends. So, in the Soviet era there appears socialist realism declared as the "official" method Soviet literature. This is a highly ideological form of realism, which aimed to show the inevitable collapse of the bourgeois system. In reality, however, almost all Soviet art was called “socialist realism,” and the criteria turned out to be completely blurred. Today this term has only a historical meaning; it is not relevant in relation to modern literature.
If in the middle of the 19th century realism reigned almost unchallenged, then by the end of the 19th century the situation changed. Over the last century, realism has experienced fierce competition from others. aesthetic systems, which, naturally, one way or another changes the character of realism itself. Let’s say, M. A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” is a realistic work, but at the same time there is a noticeable symbolic meaning in it, which noticeably changes the tenets of “classical realism”.
Modernist movements of the late 19th – 20th centuries
The twentieth century, like no other, was marked by the competition of many trends in art. These directions are completely different, they compete with each other, replace each other, and take into account each other’s achievements. The only thing that unites them is opposition to classical realistic art, attempts to find their own ways of reflecting reality. These directions are united by the conventional term “modernism”. The term “modernism” itself (from “modern” - modern) arose in the romantic aesthetics of A. Schlegel, but then it did not take root. But it came into use a hundred years later, at the end of the 19th century, and began to denote at first strange, unusual aesthetic systems. Today “modernism” is a term with extremely broad meaning, which actually stands in two oppositions: on the one hand, it is “everything that is not realism,” on the other (in recent years) it is what “postmodernism” is not. Thus, the concept of modernism reveals itself negatively - by the method of “by contradiction”. Naturally, with this approach we are not talking about any structural clarity.
There are a huge number of modernist trends; we will focus only on the most significant:
Impressionism (from the French “impression” - impression) - a movement in the art of the last third of the 19th - early 20th centuries, which originated in France and then spread throughout the world. Representatives of impressionism sought to capturethe real world in its mobility and variability, to convey your fleeting impressions. The Impressionists themselves called themselves “new realists”; the term appeared later, after 1874, when the now famous work by C. Monet “Sunrise” was demonstrated at the exhibition. Impression". At first, the term “impressionism” had a negative connotation, expressing bewilderment and even disdain of critics, but the artists themselves, “to spite the critics,” accepted it, and over time the negative connotations disappeared.
In painting, impressionism had a huge influence on all subsequent development of art.
In literature, the role of impressionism was more modest; it did not develop as an independent movement. However, the aesthetics of impressionism influenced the work of many authors, including in Russia. Trust in “fleeting things” is marked by many poems by K. Balmont, I. Annensky and others. In addition, impressionism was reflected in the color scheme of many writers, for example, its features are noticeable in the palette of B. Zaitsev.
However, as an integral movement, impressionism did not appear in literature, becoming a characteristic background of symbolism and neorealism.
Symbolism – one of the most powerful directions of modernism, quite diffuse in its attitudes and quests. Symbolism began to take shape in France in the 70s of the 19th century and quickly spread throughout Europe.
By the 90s, symbolism had become a pan-European trend, with the exception of Italy, where, for reasons that are not entirely clear, it did not take root.
In Russia, symbolism began to manifest itself in the late 80s, and emerged as a conscious movement by the mid-90s.
According to the time of formation and the characteristics of the worldview, it is customary to distinguish two main stages in Russian symbolism. Poets who made their debut in the 1890s are called “senior symbolists” (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub, etc.).
In the 1900s, a number of new names appeared that significantly changed the face of symbolism: A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov and others. The accepted designation of the “second wave” of symbolism is “young symbolism.” It is important to take into account that the “senior” and “younger” symbolists were separated not so much by age (for example, Vyacheslav Ivanov gravitates towards the “elders” in age), but by the difference in worldviews and the direction of creativity.
The work of the older symbolists fits more closely into the canon of neo-romanticism. Characteristic motives are loneliness, the chosenness of the poet, the imperfection of the world. In the poems of K. Balmont, the influence of impressionist technique is noticeable; the early Bryusov had a lot of technical experiments and verbal exoticism.
The Young Symbolists created a more holistic and original concept, which was based on the merging of life and art, on the idea of improving the world according to aesthetic laws. The mystery of existence cannot be expressed in ordinary words; it is only guessed in the system of symbols intuitively found by the poet. The concept of mystery, the unmanifestation of meanings, became the mainstay of symbolist aesthetics. Poetry, according to Vyach. Ivanov, there is a “secret record of the ineffable.” The social and aesthetic illusion of Young Symbolism was that through the “prophetic word” one can change the world. Therefore, they saw themselves not only as poets, but also demiurges, that is, the creators of the world. The unfulfilled utopia led in the early 1910s to a total crisis of symbolism, to the collapse of it as an integral system, although the “echoes” of symbolist aesthetics were heard for a long time.
Regardless of the implementation of social utopia, symbolism has extremely enriched Russian and world poetry. The names of A. Blok, I. Annensky, Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely and other prominent symbolist poets are the pride of Russian literature.
Acmeism(from the Greek “acme” - “the highest degree, peak, flowering, blooming time”) is a literary movement that arose in the early tenths of the 20th century in Russia. Historically, Acmeism was a reaction to the crisis of symbolism. In contrast to the “secret” word of the Symbolists, the Acmeists proclaimed the value of the material, the plastic objectivity of images, the accuracy and sophistication of the word.
The formation of Acmeism is closely connected with the activities of the organization “Workshop of Poets”, the central figures of which were N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. Acmeism was also supported by O. Mandelstam, the early A. Akhmatova, V. Narbut and others. Later, however, Akhmatova questioned the aesthetic unity of Acmeism and even the legitimacy of the term itself. But one can hardly agree with her on this: the aesthetic unity of the Acmeist poets, at least in the early years, is beyond doubt. And the point is not only in the programmatic articles of N. Gumilyov and O. Mandelstam, where the aesthetic credo of the new movement is formulated, but above all in the practice itself. Acmeism strangely combined a romantic craving for the exotic, for wanderings with sophistication of words, which made it similar to the Baroque culture.
Favorite images of Acmeism - exotic beauty (so, in any period of Gumilyov’s creativity, poems appear about exotic animals: giraffe, jaguar, rhinoceros, kangaroo, etc.), images of culture(in Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam), the love theme is dealt with very plastically. Often an object detail becomes a psychological sign(for example, a glove from Gumilyov or Akhmatova).
At first The world appears to the Acmeists as exquisite, but “toy-like,” emphatically unreal. For example, O. Mandelstam’s famous early poem goes like this:
They burn with gold leaf
There are Christmas trees in the forests;
Toy wolves in the bushes
They look with scary eyes.
Oh, my prophetic sadness,
Oh my quiet freedom
And the lifeless sky
Always laughing crystal!
Later, the paths of the Acmeists diverged; little remained of the former unity, although the majority of poets retained loyalty to the ideals of high culture and the cult of poetic mastery to the end. Many major literary artists came out of Acmeism. Russian literature has the right to be proud of the names of Gumilev, Mandelstam and Akhmatova.
Futurism(from Latin “futurus” " - future). If symbolism, as mentioned above, did not take root in Italy, then futurism, on the contrary, is of Italian origin. The “father” of futurism is considered to be the Italian poet and art theorist F. Marinetti, who proposed a shocking and tough theory of new art. In fact, Marinetti was talking about the mechanization of art, about depriving it of spirituality. Art should become akin to a “play on a mechanical piano”, all verbal delights are unnecessary, spirituality is an outdated myth.
Marinetti's ideas exposed the crisis of classical art and were taken up by "rebellious" aesthetic groups in different countries.
In Russia, the first futurists were the artists the Burliuk brothers. David Burliuk founded the futurist colony “Gilea” on his estate. He managed to rally around himself various poets and artists who were unlike anyone else: Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Elena Guro and others.
The first manifestos of Russian futurists were frankly shocking in nature (even the name of the manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” speaks for itself), but even with this, the Russian futurists did not initially accept Marinetti’s mechanism, setting themselves other tasks. Marinetti's arrival in Russia caused disappointment among Russian poets and further emphasized the differences.
The Futurists aimed to create a new poetics, a new system of aesthetic values. The masterly play with words, the aestheticization of everyday objects, the speech of the street - all this excited, shocked, and caused resonance. The catchy, visible nature of the image irritated some, delighted others:
Every word
even a joke
which he spews out with his burning mouth,
thrown out like a naked prostitute
from a burning brothel.
(V. Mayakovsky, “Cloud in Pants”)
Today we can admit that much of the Futurists’ creativity has not stood the test of time and is only of historical interest, but in general, the influence of the Futurists’ experiments on the subsequent development of art (and not only verbal, but also pictorial and musical) turned out to be colossal.
Futurism had within itself several currents, sometimes approaching, sometimes conflicting: cubo-futurism, ego-futurism (Igor Severyanin), the “Centrifuge” group (N. Aseev, B. Pasternak).
Although very different from each other, these groups converged on a new understanding of the essence of poetry and a desire for verbal experiments. Russian futurism gave the world several poets of enormous scale: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Velimir Khlebnikov.
Existentialism (from Latin “exsistentia” - existence). Existentialism cannot be called a literary movement in the full sense of the word; it is rather a philosophical movement, a concept of man, manifested in many works of literature. The origins of this movement can be found in the 19th century in the mystical philosophy of S. Kierkegaard, but existentialism received its real development in the 20th century. Among the most significant existentialist philosophers we can name G. Marcel, K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre and others. Existentialism is a very diffuse system, having many variations and varieties. However, the general features that allow us to talk about some unity are the following:
1. Recognition of the personal meaning of existence . In other words, the world and man in their primary essence are personal principles. The mistake of the traditional view, according to existentialists, is that human life is viewed as if “from the outside,” objectively, and the uniqueness of human life lies precisely in the fact that it There is and that she my. That is why G. Marcel proposed to consider the relationship between man and the world not according to the “He is the World” scheme, but according to the “I – You” scheme. My attitude towards another person is only a special case of this comprehensive scheme.
M. Heidegger said the same thing somewhat differently. In his opinion, the basic question about man must be changed. We are trying to answer, " What there is a person”, but you need to ask “ Who there is a man." This radically changes the entire coordinate system, since in the usual world we will not see the foundations of each person’s unique “self.”
2. Recognition of the so-called “borderline situation” , when this “self” becomes directly accessible. In ordinary life, this “I” is not directly accessible, but in the face of death, against the background of non-existence, it manifests itself. The concept of a border situation had a huge influence on the literature of the 20th century - both among writers directly associated with the theory of existentialism (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre), and authors generally far from this theory, for example, on the idea of a border situation almost all the plots of Vasil Bykov's war stories are constructed.
3. Recognition of a person as a project . In other words, the original “I” given to us forces us to make the only possible choice every time. And if a person’s choice turns out to be unworthy, the person begins to collapse, no matter what external reasons he may justify.
Existentialism, we repeat, did not develop as a literary movement, but it had a huge influence on modern world culture. In this sense, it can be considered an aesthetic and philosophical direction of the 20th century.
Surrealism(French “surrealisme”, lit. - “super-realism”) - a powerful trend in painting and literature of the 20th century, however, it left the greatest mark in painting, primarily due to its authority famous artist Salvador Dali. Dali’s infamous phrase regarding his disagreements with other leaders of the movement “a surrealist is me”, for all its shockingness, clearly places emphasis. Without the figure of Salvador Dali, surrealism probably would not have had such an impact on the culture of the 20th century.
At the same time, the founder of this movement is not Dali or even the artist, but precisely the writer Andre Breton. Surrealism took shape in the 1920s as a left-radical movement, but noticeably different from futurism. Surrealism reflected the social, philosophical, psychological and aesthetic paradoxes of European consciousness. Europe is tired of social tensions, of traditional art forms, of hypocrisy in ethics. This “protest” wave gave birth to surrealism.
The authors of the first declarations and works of surrealism (Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, etc.) set the goal of “liberating” creativity from all conventions. Great importance was attached to unconscious impulses and random images, which, however, were then subjected to careful artistic processing.
Freudianism, which actualized human erotic instincts, had a serious influence on the aesthetics of surrealism.
In the late 20s - 30s, surrealism played a very noticeable role in European culture, but the literary component of this movement gradually weakened. Major writers and poets, in particular Eluard and Aragon, moved away from surrealism. Andre Breton's attempts after the war to revive the movement were unsuccessful, while in painting surrealism provided a much more powerful tradition.
Postmodernism - a powerful literary movement of our time, very diverse, contradictory and fundamentally open to any innovations. The philosophy of postmodernism was formed mainly in the school of French aesthetic thought (J. Derrida, R. Barthes, J. Kristeva, etc.), but today it has spread far beyond the borders of France.
At the same time, many philosophical origins and first works refer to the American tradition, and the term “postmodernism” itself in relation to literature was first used by the American literary critic of Arab origin, Ihab Hasan (1971).
The most important feature of postmodernism is the fundamental rejection of any centricity and any value hierarchy. All texts are fundamentally equal and capable of coming into contact with each other. There is no high and low art, modern and outdated. From the standpoint of culture, they all exist in some “now,” and since the value chain is fundamentally destroyed, no text has any advantages over another.
In the works of postmodernists, almost any text from any era comes into play. The boundary between one’s own and someone else’s word is also being destroyed, so texts by famous authors can be interspersed into a new work. This principle is called " centonity principle» (centon is a game genre when a poem is composed of different lines from other authors).
Postmodernism is radically different from all other aesthetic systems. In various schemes (for example, in the well-known schemes of Ihab Hassan, V. Brainin-Passek, etc.) dozens of distinctive features of postmodernism are noted. This is an attitude towards play, conformism, recognition of the equality of cultures, an attitude towards secondaryness (i.e. postmodernism does not aim to say something new about the world), orientation towards commercial success, recognition of the infinity of the aesthetic (i.e. everything can be art) etc.
Both writers and literary critics have an ambiguous attitude towards postmodernism: from complete acceptance to categorical denial.
IN last decade people are increasingly talking about the crisis of postmodernism and reminding us of the responsibility and spirituality of culture.
For example, P. Bourdieu considers postmodernism a variant of “radical chic”, spectacular and comfortable at the same time, and calls not to destroy science (and in the context it is clear - art) “in the fireworks of nihilism.”
Many American theorists have also made sharp attacks against postmodern nihilism. In particular, the book “Against Deconstruction” by J. M. Ellis, which contains a critical analysis of postmodernist attitudes, caused a stir. Now, however, this scheme is noticeably more complicated. It is customary to talk about pre-symbolism, early symbolism, mystical symbolism, post-symbolism, etc. However, this does not cancel the naturally formed division into older and younger.
The turn of the century set a starting point in understanding the modern literary process and its directions. The “era of ideological vacuum,” which covered the destruction of the values of previous periods with the fashionable term “postmodernism,” has exhausted itself. Writers came to the fore, striving to overcome the gap that had formed between the USSR and Russia (both pre-revolutionary and today), to express phenomenality in the very substance of literature, in its ontological layers people's destiny, the nation’s awareness of its Russianness. These are the prose writers V. Galaktionova, V. Degtev, B. Evseev, Yu. Kozlov, V. Lichutin, Yu. Polyakov, Z. Prilepin and others.
Their style of thinking can be described as a thinking style phenomenological entities. For example, for Vladimir Lichutin these are the concepts of national history: “Schism”, spiritual “Wandering”, “Wandering”, correlated with the mythologeme “paradise lost - paradise found”. In the novels and stories of Yuri Polyakov, the main types of heroes - the apothegist and the escaper - correspond to two phenomena of the national mentality: “apofegism” (the author’s neologism, suggesting a devil-may-care, cynical attitude towards the environment) and “escapism” (spiritual escape from reality, duty, responsibilities; self-isolation from reality). In the works of Boris Evseev, the nature of things, their pure essences are revealed with the help of a zoomorphic code: “white falcon of Russia”, “ram” - symbols of the energy of life itself. Vera Galaktionova also uses “Love”, “System”, “Freedom”, “Split” on equal terms with human heroes.
But if the new quality of prose is beyond doubt among most critics, a different situation has arisen regarding poetry. It became clear that the true poetic word is found not in manifestos and “yellow jackets”, as a hundred years ago in a similar period, not in “performances” and recordings of individual lines on library cards, but in the depths of ongoing events, in the recesses of the human soul. In Russian poetry at the turn of the century they were still working greatest poets the second half of the 20th century, representing a variety of thematic and stylistic trends - Yuri Kuznetsov, Nikolai Tryapkin, Gleb Gorbovsky, Oleg Chukhontsev, Vasily Kazantsev, Evgeny Rein, Igor Shklyarevsky... But the need for a completely new word was already felt. General dissatisfaction resulted in a discussion in 2004 on the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta “New Century. What about poetry?”, and this discussion recorded not only the turn of the latest Russian literature towards the classical tradition.
We are accustomed to the fact that poetry is always at the forefront of the literary process, that it is poetry that reacts most quickly and sensitively to spiritual and moral changes in our lives. Today, prose and journalism occupy the dominant positions. We can and, of course, need to talk about individual poetic names. For example, about Svetlana Kekova, Irina Semyonova, Vsevolod Emelin, Nikolai Zinoviev, Evgeny Semichev, Gennady Ivanov, Vladimir Boyarinov, Vladimir Beryazev, Svetlana Syrneva, Sergei Sokolkin, Vladimir Nezhdanov... But in general, the poems of current authors reveal fatigue of poetic forms, the absence of bright discoveries.
One of the indicators of the possible return of literature is the replenishment of the ranks of thoughtful critics. Here, first of all, we should highlight Vladimir Bondarenko, Pavel Basinsky, Mikhail Boyko, Yuri Pavlov, Lev Danilkin, Lev Pirogov, Alexei Shorokhov - although examples that, in terms of the degree of impact on readers, could be compared with Belinsky’s criticism in the 19th century. or Kozhinov in the 20th century, it’s difficult to name.
So, here are the iconic works of the first literary decade of the 21st century. – more precisely, works that left a mark on the perception of the reader of the new century. This:
1. Valentin Rasputin. The story “Ivan’s Daughter, Ivan’s Mother” (2003).
2. Vladimir Lichutin. Novels "Milady Rothman" (1999-2001) and "Fugitive from Paradise" (2005).
3. Yuri Polyakov. Novel “The Mushroom King” (2001-2005).
4. Vera Galaktionova. Novel “5/4 on the Eve of Silence” (2004).
5. Zakhar Prilepin. Novel “Sankya” (2006).
6. Boris Evseev. Collection of short stories “The Narrow Ribbon of Life” (2005).
7. Yuri Kozlov. Novel “The Reformer” (1999-2001).
8. Vladimir Kantor. Story “Death of a Pensioner” (2008)
“What happened to us after?”- question Valentina Rasputina in the story “French Lessons”, it seems to sound like this among the classic questions of the 11th century: “ what to do?" and “who is to blame?” But let’s listen to this question - not read into it, but listen... And we’ll catch something completely different in it: “ what happened with us after?"– gone into dreams, daydreams, into the realm of myths and legends about the past? After all, the main feature of Rasputin’s prose is the poetry of the word, which, by virtue of its nature, is addressed primarily not to sight, but to hearing. And this quality in Rasputin’s prose manifests itself in accordance with the empirical reality in which the author lives - a man who saw neither the Patriotic War, nor collectivization, nor tsarist times, but could only hear their echo. And he himself became an echo of the Russian people, an echo of the tragedy of the Russian peasantry.
Hence the strict imperative: “ Live and remember" Without memory there is no life, and without life there is no memory, there is no spiritual world that makes up the meaning of our lives. This imperative (" live and remember") and this question (" what happened to us? or “What became dreams?”) can be traced in literally all the writer’s works, acquiring a piercing sound in the story “Ivan’s Daughter, Ivan’s Mother” (2003) about post-Soviet life, where the planned “bright past” did not come true, where many national mythologies collapsed.
The idea of clan continuity, put forward in the title of the story, acquires the status of a national, sovereign one as the plot develops. Ivan’s daughter, Ivan’s mother is, after all, Russia itself: on the emblematic level specified by the name, a double-headed eagle, or rather an eagle, facing simultaneously in different directions of the world. With one face - into the past, which “as if never existed,” but which is constantly present in the thoughts and actions of the heroes; for others - into a forcibly cut off future. But what about the real thing? Maybe he's not there either? And the market, which took over the factory floors, the motor depot where the heroine’s husband Anatoly worked (sphere labor activity); the school where their children studied (the sphere of upbringing and education); the police, the prosecutor's office, the court, selling “justice” (the sphere of law and order) - all this distorted reality is also just an obsession, a dream?
Unfortunately, it's an obsession, but not a dream.
It is clear that the author does not idealize the past - it is no coincidence that his heroine still “escaped” from native village(then her daughter Svetlana runs away from the post-Soviet school in the same way). It is also clear that the writer, despite the seemingly life-affirming ending of the story, does not see the future in a rosy light - rather, as a continuation of the same market, where on one side of the counter new gentlemen rule, “conscious of their strength,” and on the other there is a crowd of “ people who don’t understand what’s happening to them….” But it is equally clear that for now, people like Tamara Ivanovna, the main character of the story, will be broken out of this people, from their “mass-voluntary slavery”; her son Ivan; the reliable man Demin, who has not lost himself in the new conditions, or the honest servant of the law, investigator Nikolin, - Russia will not dry up!
It seems that there are few of them, very few people capable of decisive action. And they themselves sometimes feel like a grain of sand in the inexorable millstones of “fate and fate.” However, even a “grain of sand” can disrupt a mechanism once started. Evidence of this is Tamara Ivanovna’s shot. One can, of course, object: they say, this is a gesture of despair. But a desperate person also has a choice: either to come to terms with the “garbage philosophy” of groveling, or to rebel. The main question of Rasputin’s story is not about the “grain of sand”’s ability to rebel, but about its readiness for conscious action. The inevitability of a life-or-death struggle for a nation, by its nature non-commercial, with the expansion of commerce and violence, is obvious to him. And here another question arises: what spiritual and moral values can the Russian people rely on in this battle?
The heroine’s “talking” surname – Vorotnikova – seems to refer us to the already rather tired and tired search for “lost roots”. But have the concepts of conscience, shame, honor, national dignity completely disappeared from our society? If anything needs to be revived, then first of all the male hypostasis of the people's soul, the male volitional principle, which presupposes efficiency, thriftiness, the ability to say “no” to an uninvited guest and, of course, a sober assessment of the current situation, i.e. volitional knowledge.
Once upon a time, the concepts of Logos (knowledge, ideas, spiritual principles) and the Word were inseparable. The ways of reviving the people's soul in all its fullness, according to Rasputin, are hidden in the very nature of the Russian Word, which is much clogged, subjected to the temptation of “surrendering to the mercy of an alien established life.” And, nevertheless, “it, this word, is stronger than the anthem and the flag, the oath and the vow... It is there - and everything else is there, but if it is not, there will be nothing to consolidate the most sincere impulses with.” This, with the persuasiveness of the artistic unconscious, is evidenced in the final scene of the story by a small speech shift, in the imaginary smallness of which lies the overcoming of national self-alienation, “foreignness”, “foreignness” (“as if they alienated the Russians,” Rasputin’s heroes are sad). Having suffered for her daughter, but not broken, “Ivan’s daughter” says to her husband who awkwardly hugged her: “Why are you treating me like some kind of niece...”. But we understand that the heroine who returned from prison wanted to say: “as a captive”... (here it is - an echo of her daughter’s fate). A small speech inclusion - me, me - with an ancient syllable replaces the inferiority of the “captive”, breaking the irreplaceability of the loss with a new return of the “alienated” Russians to themselves: the reunification of national ties as clan-wide ones.
A special place in the literary process at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. takes Vladimir Lichutin, which combined the artistic achievements of the generation of Valentin Rasputin and Leonid Borodin with the spiritual quest of the “new wave” prose writers. Each of his works - and in the 1990s - 2000s this was the historical epic novel "Raskol" (1984–1997), a book of reflections on the Russian people "The Inexplicable Soul" (2000), a novel about love and the metamorphoses of national life "Milady Rothman" (1999–2001) and the acutely social novel "Fugitive from Paradise" (2005), the autobiographical story "The Golden Dream" (2007) and the lyrical "River of Love" (2010) - reveals to us the unexpected face of the author of "The Winged Seraphim" (1978) and “Lyubostaya” (1987).
A writer with an amazing singing gift, he is a completely independent phenomenon in Russian linguistic culture. Despite the well-known closeness of his work to “village prose,” Lichutin cannot be called a “villageist” in the literal sense of the word: he still looks at rural life through the eyes of a city man. What he has in common with the peasant branch of Russian literature is not ethnographic ornamentalism, but the idea of Russianness, which he defended back in the “Soviet multinational” era. On the other hand, a reflective hero who dies from egocentric masochism is a sign of a completely different kind of writing, if we keep in mind that in the works of everyone literary direction his own model of the world is formed, unique to him. It is no coincidence that in the 1980s Lichutin was included in the “Moscow school of forty-year-olds,” which included A. Prokhanov, V. Makanin, A. Afanasyev, A. Kim and others. However, even there he stood apart. V. Bondarenko accurately defined its artistic dominant - memory of the national past, “space of the soul”, “spiritual pilgrimage” .
Like Viktor Astafiev, Lichutin writes about soul- an elusive subject, but in fact it is part of our national everything: It is here and above all here that he reveals himself to be an original artist. If the “villagers” looked with caution at the mystical properties of the Russian soul, and representatives of the newest Russian prose more objectify their own fantasies and experiences, then Lichutin is looking for great faith Russian man into a miracle, to leave which means to abandon one’s national self.
This is probably why many critics write about Lichutin’s adherence to the classical tradition. This is true and not true. The true innovation of a writer is always in the discovery (and hard-won, felt only by him) of his hero. And when we talk about this or that Tradition, wanting to elevate a writer to it, we must remember: without Pushkin there would be no Larina and Onegin, without Turgenev there would be no Turgenev’s young ladies and Bazarov, without Dostoevsky there would be no Raskolnikov. But we can say it another way: without these heroes there would be no writers themselves.
So Lichutin, it would seem, an unconditional traditionalist, suddenly has a kind of phantom in the rifts of the current intercentury: a “former” Russian and a “new Jew” - Vanka Zhukov from a Pomeranian village. Created initially by nature as a strong-willed personality, the hero of the novel “Milady Rothman” does not find the prosperity he seeks either on the Russian or on the Jewish path, revealing a nationwide syndrome of restlessness and homelessness, which seems to have supplanted the high “spiritual pilgrimage.” The author’s precisely sculpted pastiche image of the “hero of our time” is illuminated by the image of Russia... after Russia. A hero whose family tree includes Chekhov’s Vanka Zhukov, an inept letter writer who seemingly disappeared forever in the darkness of Russian downtroddenness (but his letter has reached us!); but also, in his hidden tragedy, Solzhenitsyn’s (Marshal) Zhukov, the hero of Russian history in all its ups and downs (the story “On the Edges”). The main character of the novel, Russia, is also unexpected, turning into... “Milady Rothman”: not at all a “district young lady”, but one who recklessly gives her beauty (and with it her fate) to a visiting fellow. We can say that before us is a completely new outline of the female soul of Russia.
Obviously, Lichutin’s own is a type of marginal hero that runs through all his works, in whose split consciousness he realizes himself, in all his drama, phenomenon of schism, included in the title of Lichutin’s novel of the same name. "Milady Rothman" ends with death stumbled- on the mirage of a swamp island, in an enchanted, alluring place - the hero. The splitting of the world into existence and non-existence also takes away the life of Fisa, the wife of the “household philosopher” from the story of the same name in bygone years (1983). The dualism of external and internal, secret thoughts and meager realities permeates the fates of the characters in the stories “The White Room” (1972), “Widow Nyura” (1974), “Farmazon” (1979), and manifests itself in the stories of the heroes of the novel “Wanderers” about Russia in the 19th century. V. (1974–1982). And this core of the Russian world being built by Lichutin allows us to show the dialectics of the Russian path: a split is followed by a new (albeit not always successful) synthesis and, then, a new splitting of national destiny, a new flight from “paradise”...
The novel “Fugitive from Paradise” is about the same thing: highly polemical, innovative both for the author himself and for the current literary process. The time of action is the transition from Yeltsin to Putin's rule (although politics is given only in the background of television and through the reflection of the hero). This is a story about modern Oblomov, a psychological scientist and former Yeltsin adviser, who created the “new Russia”, but fled from the Kremlin and declared a kind of boycott of the emerging reality (not without his direct participation). Either lying down on the sofa in his Moscow den, or driving into a shallow village, the hero assesses very negatively what is happening around him. A kind of nihilist with democratic experience and a box of historical flaws behind him - in search of eternal values and saving ideals. But, looking around in horror, he saw “Russia, living according to a system of failures,” the personification of which is a TV set with puppet figures of leaders and others like them, tightly locked in a “box” of pseudo-times.
Of course, we should not forget that everything depicted in this book is shown through the eyes of the hero, person in denial: the narration is told from his “I”, making the most impartial assessments of current politics, those in power, present-day Russia and the West, emancipated women and weak-willed men. The author has accurately noticed a phenomenon of our days that has nothing to do with true democracy. Let us note that the hero-psychologist himself is a former builder of “heaven on earth,” and it was on his advice that the skillful manipulation of mass consciousness was carried out, taking into account the eternal Russian long-suffering, mercy towards not the fallen, but those fattening in power.
The reformer's disappointment in the fruits of his own efforts is a consequence of pseudo-democratic nihilism, which mercilessly destroyed the previous system, but never created anything fundamentally new. The resulting chimera is only a link in a general chain of historical failures that the retired professor is studying. According to his logic, a new failure at the end of the century is natural - after all, another “anti-system has been created that denies nature as its own mother.” The source of current Russian failures is seen in the past, which rapidly de-peasantized in the 20th century. Russia. And in this the author agrees with his hero.
The writer managed to capture the most " pain points» modernity. This split national identity (social, historical, gender), decay(marriage, family, society), situation loss(past, former stability, values and ideals). The instant restoration of the rural (love) idyll at the end of the novel gives the hero (and the reader) a shaky hope: for the continuation of life, the revival of the chain of times and simply human happiness. But everything always turns into its opposite. And the hero runs, runs away from the inhuman norms of a corrupt society. But can you run away from yourself? And here “paradise returned” is not expected.
In Russian literature, there has long been a type of writer who masterfully masters a variety of literary genres and combines an artist and a public figure. The clearest example recent years - prose writer, essayist and playwright Yuri Polyakov. The gap between word and deed, myth and logos, Russianness and Sovietness is recorded in his artistic worlds with the mercilessness of perhaps the most important issues of the present and, perhaps, future centuries.
What is Soviet civilization? What are the reasons for its collapse? And what lies behind it - degeneration or revival of a nation that has suffered through the right to a decent life in Russia, which is restoring its sovereign status? Actually, it is in the answers to these questions that the creative face of the writer emerges - outwardly calm, ironic and even defiantly ironic. But let's take a closer look at his works - and we will see not only irony.
Yu. Polyakov's style of thinking - an amazing fusion of lyricism, irony and tragedy - is distinguished by greater social vigilance and greater grounding in real issues. Perhaps that is why (in comparison with, say, P. Krusanov or Yu. Kozlov, with their passion for “literary science fiction”), while appearing to the reader from any angle - from modernism to postmodernism (and even on the verge of kitsch), he remains predominantly a realist, although not in the traditional sense. However, the departure from tradition while at the same time following it constitutes the paradox of the newest Russian prose on the crest of the intercentury: its daring attempt to say its unborrowed word, not playing with old forms in the spirit of postmodern citations, but refracting the high canon into a new reality, immensely pushing its boundaries and our ideas about it.
Yu. Polyakov's texts unfold on two related levels. The first, accessible to everyone, is a boldly twisted intrigue, a tightly “knocked down” plot, adventurous and picaresque, love adventures, etc., etc. But there is another layer, which often comes into “counter-feeling” with the first (L . Vygotsky). Then, through the outwardly “low”, ordinary, everyday life, the high grows: directed towards the Eternal, not subject to any moral deformations and social cataclysms. The woman you love and the book you are writing - what could be more important?- the hero of one of the best works by Yu. Polyakov asks himself and us.
His first stories, “One Hundred Days Before the Order” (1980), “Emergency of a Regional Scale” (1981), published after many years of ordeals with censorship authorities, caused all-Union discussions, and in a certain sense became the harbingers of Gorbachev’s perestroika. They looked through the prism of the local situation the worldview of a person in Soviet civilization in its internal split into ideal and real being. “These two lives - real and imaginary - are vitally connected,” says the hero of the story “One Hundred Days Before the Order,” and deliberate incorrectness in one of them (especially in the ideal one) leads to the breakdown of the entire System.
Another pole in Polyakov’s typology of heroes and characters is the figure of the “ruler” of the thoughts of the masses involved in the political ferment. In the story “Apothegeus”, the spectrum of thoughts of the author-narrator about the fate of Russia in the turning point of the 1980s and 90s converges on the figure of the BMP, the main bearer of the idea of apothegism. The type bred by the writer is a special one, and with a very meager pedigree: Sobakevich, Ugryum-Burcheev, Samoglotov. Obviously, this is a completely new type of hero, generated by the loss of faith in the institutions of the dominant ideology in all strata of society.
Author's neologism " apogee“, formed from two Greek words-concepts - apotheosis and apogee, reveals the deep origins of the coming civilizational catastrophe: cutting off national roots, replacing true patriotism with official love for “our socialist homeland.”
The satirical story-pamphlet “Demgorodok” (1991–1993), the name of which ironically stands for the town (country) of the demos (i.e., the people), is about this. The motives of the game and flirting of the authorities with the people, the dialectic of the Soviet and national in the concept of “people (nation)” are translated into different - sometimes ironic-fairy-tale, sometimes satirical (in the spirit of Shchedrin’s story about the inhabitants of the city of Foolov) - layers of a fantastic narrative about the revolution of the pseudo-democratic regime and the construction of a neo-totalitarian society. The author does not hide that the construction of the “Reborn Fatherland” on the bones of the “anti-people regime” has nothing to do with genuine improvement national life.
In the story “Parisian Love by Kostya Gumankov” (1989-1991), historical time and the fate of the nation in global world refracted through the personal destinies of the heroes. The initial countdown of the action dates back to the mid-1970s: the romantic, for the Soviet intelligentsia, “the era of universal “mastery”.” Then the story about France and love transfers
us in 1984 - the very beginning of perestroika, the threshold of new revolutionary illusions and new disappointments. The game with temporal layers captures the spheres of consciousness of the author, narrator and characters.
The story “The Sky of the Fallen” (1997) and the story “The Red Telephone” (1997), also touching on the problem of “Russian (Soviet) man on a rendezvous with Western civilization,” offer several implementations of the eternal dream of finding heaven on earth. The heroes of both works, the “new Russians,” are successful and rich, they are not scoundrels, not cynics, they are energetic and courageous and, according to current canons, they may well bring happiness to their chosen ones, but love here is called passion, sexual satisfaction. The conflict between dreams and reality is replaced by the alternative “sex and money.” But even in this area of self-affirmation, everything is much more complicated than it might seem at first glance.
The epigraph from “Manon Lescaut” by A. F. Prevost, which precedes “The Sky of the Fallen” - a story about painful passion mixed with money, the pursuit of pleasure, cheating, risk, and the inevitability of the end - not only correlates “The Sky of the Fallen” with a brilliant example of a turning point (for French and Russian culture) of the 18th century, when the philosophy of hedonism practically equated the male sex with the power of gold in the eyes of the fair sex, but also includes Pole’s story in a certain tradition. Here and there - the hero’s life is broken by passion; here and there - love is always right. Finally, here and there there is an aura of mystery of the heroines. But there are also many differences. The heroine of the French novelist uses men, submitting to the dictates of male civilization. The heroine of a modern writer, on the contrary, challenges her. Although she often resembles a post-Soviet slave - a woman kneeling before the new master of an upside-down world.
However, the main works of Yu. Polyakov at the moment can be called the novels “Little Goat in Milk” (1993–1995), “I Planned an Escape...” (1995–1999) and “The Mushroom Tsar” (2001-2005).
“Little Goat in Milk,” the plot of which is based on the history of a literary hoax, shows that in Polyakov’s prose, ideological, national, gender, and literary myths enter into competitive relationships, flowing into each other, changing plus to minus and, conversely, mutually rejecting and affirming paradoxical, from an ordinary point of view, meanings. Thus, the reconstruction of a certain literary phantom in “The Kid” takes place in the spirit of a socialist realist myth, at the center of which is a fundamental axiom: the idea of creating a “perfect man.” This - alas, not solved, not embodied in reality, super-task of the great “method” - is consonant with the seemingly absurd idea of the main character of the novel: a daring debater who pledged to make a great writer out of ... the first person he met: to create a myth without Logos, without freedom of speech.
In the novel, named by Pushkin’s line “I planned an escape...”, a turning point in the historical period in the life of the country is reflected in the fate of one (post)Soviet family. The vacillations of its head, a well-to-do man in the past, but who, after a series of failures, is finding his place in the banking system, reflect the crisis of the transition period. Leading a double life, Oleg Trudovich Bashmakov - either coming to terms with his marital status, or trying to escape to his next mistress - represents a type modified in new circumstances person leaving, escaper involuntarily. Escapeism– mental escape, withdrawal into oneself – is presented in the novel as a meta-society in a state of sociohistorical rupture, the breakdown of former norms and beliefs. The “spirit of heights” that permeates the entire novel action of the escaping hero, that is, not daring to live a real life, materializes grotesquely in the finale. Clinging to the edge of existence - above the failure of his life - the hero-escaper is connected with the terribly growing image of a crippled disabled person, calling into his oblivion. In the light of such shifting meanings, the “bar” of Pushkin’s verse set by the title is “ Long ago, a tired slave, I planned to escape..." - is perceived as height not taken by the hero.
The detective intrigue in which Yu. Polyakov’s philosophical thoughts are wrapped in the novel “The Mushroom Tsar” about the entrepreneur Svirelnikov chasing crazy luck reveals the genre search of modern serious prose, its turn towards plot and fascination. As a result, a rich picture of our reality is created - with access to its most diverse layers, in a broad sociohistorical, political, ideological context, capturing the history of the country from revolutionary-Stalin times to the collapse of the Soviet system and beyond.
In recent years, Yu. Polyakov has rapidly risen to the ranks of famous playwrights. With his plays and dramatizations (“Test Shot”, “Halam-Bundu”, “Homo Erectus”, “Demgorodok”, “Little Goat in Milk”) in the leading theaters of the country and abroad, he challenged the postmodernist assurances that interest falls to modern dramaturgy. Moreover: by filling postmodernist models (in particular, in the productions of “Little Goat in Milk” that parody postmodernism) with topical content, he was able to prove in practice that socially oriented realism and modernism are capable of attracting the viewer more than pop culture.
Showing himself as a bright publicist, actively participating in the formation of national consciousness, Polyakov follows Tolstoy’s principle “I cannot remain silent.” The publication of his articles and books (“From the Empire of Lies to the Republic of Lies”, 1997; “Pornocracy”, 2004; “Why are you, masters of culture?”, 2005), continuing the traditions of domestic journalism and at the same time demonstrating the original system of the author’s views and ideas is always an event in public life.
So in the movement of modern literature as a spiritual, essential thing, the antihero who filled the pages of modern books is replaced by thought as the main “hero of our time”. After all, it is “thought gives existence a word» .
At the turn of the century, the prose writer attracted readerly and literary-critical attention Boris Evseev. If in his early story “Orpheus” the spontaneous development of various literary traditions, represented, in particular, by the names of L. Andreev and J. Updike, is still noticeable, then in “Nikola Mokroy” (1992) - a story about the hunt for a deserter that unfolded before the eyes of the hero - and in Evseev’s subsequent works, his own orientation towards the specifics of the word as an aesthetic object powerfully asserts itself. Artistic means and techniques (metaphors, epithets, inversion, grotesque, poetic etymology, etc.) are increasingly and more purposefully used by him not as a function of deviation from the “worn out” semantic or stylistic norm, but in a subject-nominative manner. It is as if figurative meanings are cut off as superfluous in order to give space to the original, original - the true face of things in their essence, cleared of random connections.
The properties of this writer’s style, including paradoxical images, grotesqueness, reification of poetic language, unusual combinations of realistic and modernist elements, were especially striking in the collection “Baran” (2001), which, in addition to the title “Baran”, included the stories “Nikola Wet”, “Narrow Ribbon of Life”, “Kutum”, “Sit down. Write. Die...", "Mouth" and the story "The Fool". The idea of “The Ram” and “The Fool” can be defined as a search for a fulcrum in a situation of cultural-historical or epistemological rupture. But if in “Baran” such a search can be described as a reaction to the not yet completed self-collapse of the human in man, then in “The Fool” the prose writer opens the theme of “the last people of the last times” (G. Krasnikov).
One of Evseev’s most significant works, the novel “Renunciation Hymns” (2003), is also dedicated to the problem of the revival of Russia. The plot of the novel is when the hero, the great-grandson of a former homeowner and factory owner, comes from a quiet province to the bloody October of 1993: the reader is confronted with images of the siege of the White House, the “chaos of shooting” in the scene that crushed civilians. However, philosophical, fantastic, religious and theological motifs are woven into the sociohistorical space of the novel. The top and highest, according to the author’s plan, here becomes the “end-to-end” plot about ordeals of the soul, visions of which arise in the “test subjects” and are recorded on film by researchers in a certain secret laboratory, spun off from the Ministry of Defense and working under the guise of a business firm.
The interaction of the lower (break in historical reality) and upper (tests of the soul and the achievement of the desired purification, harmony) layers of the narrative creates the internal tension of the novel. Plots about the ordeals of the soul, forming an independent line, go back to the Byzantine canonical text “On the ordeals of the Venerable Theodora” and represent a number of paintings-tests dedicated to overcoming one or another of human sins. This is how a single narrative is formed about the earthly and spiritual ordeals of Russia in the fire of political strife, going back to the super-idea driving the author - the gathering of the disintegrating universe on a higher basis, not subject to historical cataclysms, fraught with “the verbal melody of the wonderful and preserving our souls both in heaven and on earth angelic songs: that is, hymns.”
Evseev’s retrospective story “Romanchik” (2005) has the subtitle: some features of violin technique. Through this musical prism, the author looks at 1973 and 2003, discovering phenomena and events that are very far from violin technology. “We are lost,” is the author’s conclusion. He believes that it was in the 70s that the preconditions were created for those defeats and troubles, those “orange” revolutions that surrounded Russia along the perimeter, and which are about to spread to its territory. And yet, at the center of “Romanchik” is not politics, but love - for one’s neighbor, for one’s homeland.
B. Evseev's prose of recent years is distinguished by artistic, stylistic, genre experiments aimed at overcoming the restrictive framework of the literary canon, but, paradoxically, also at the development of the classical tradition. Thus, in the story “Zhivorez” about Old Man Makhno and in the cycle “The Secret Power of Names” (primarily in the story “Borislav”) Boris Evseev takes a step towards changing the functions of the story genre, moving away from its usual episodic nature, self-isolation in a limited number of heroes. Evseev’s new type of short story combines the intense eventfulness of a Western short story with the traditional lyricism of a Russian short story. In “Zhivorez” an attempt is made to present a genre fusion of a novel and a short story, which already contains not only a single episode, but an entire life: to talk about the universal, but in a compressed text space. In fact, this seemingly unconventional undertaking is an echo of a forgotten Bunin tradition: for example, in Bunin’s story “ Dark alleys", which contains the entire life and fate of the heroine, the passage of time occurs at an extremely accelerated pace, in a rapidly unfolding narrative.
The question of the type of artistic thinking of this prose writer became controversial. Thus, L. Anninsky, P. Nikolaev and A. Turkov classify Evseev as a follower of classical realism; L. Zvonarev - hyperrealism; L. Bezhin - ornamental neorealism; I. Rostovtsev - romanticism; S. Vasilenko counts him among the representatives of the “new realism”, which took many of the techniques that both modernism and postmodernism developed; A. Bolshakova considers it possible to talk about the formation of neo-modernism in Evseev’s work, deeply Christian in its ontological essence. Of course, all these points of view have the right to exist, since they reveal different facets of the writer’s talent.
The greatest controversy in the definition creative method critics have different opinions about the works Vera Galaktionova: “Scythian prose”, “wild texts”, “archaic modernism”, “primordial realism”, “vicious, Platonic symbolism”, “village prose”, “Russian modernism”, “traditionalism in its development”. The most accurate definition in relation to her work seems to be “Russian neo-modernism” - a new, national modernism, growing out of the traditions of Gogol, Dostoevsky, L. Leonov.
The most significant works of V. Galaktionova are the fairy tale “The Big Cross” (2001), the novels “On Buyan Island” (2003) and “5/4 on the Eve of Silence” (2004), and the story “Sleeping from Sorrow” (2010). However, it can be noted that before each stage work, the writer conducts a journalistic development of the topic. Thus, the “Grand Cross” is preceded by “The Secret of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior” - a documentary story about historical reasons split of Orthodoxy. She traces the history of the creation, destruction and revival of the temple from the time of the Nikonian church reform, which she defines as “a grandiose breakdown of the religious-psychological structure of the people’s conciliar united soul,” as a result of which the fratricidal revolution of 1917 became inevitable. The restoration of the temple, according to Galaktionova, symbolizes the revival of the Russian man in his Orthodox essence.
The connection between the novel “On the Buyan Island” and the essay “Black True - White Rus'” is obvious. Saving life Slavic peoples in conditions of pervasive radioactive influence - the main theme of the essay about the contaminated Chernobyl zones surviving against all odds. In the same way, the novel about a remote taiga village holding its defense against all those who bring drugs, the all-destructive power of money and the destruction of souls to future generations, affirms the idea of national resistance to the diseases of current civilization.
The essay “A People Divided in Their Home,” in which Galaktionova explores the mechanisms of destruction of Soviet civilization and determines the ways of consolidating a multinational society in the post-Soviet space, clearly prepares the appearance of a new type of hero in her novel “5/4 on the Eve of Silence.” Electronic engineer Tsakhilganov (the son of a colonel from the Gulag system, who enriched himself in the porn business) is trying with all his might to avoid “carrying the cross” - from recognizing the crimes of his fathers before his people. Gradually, however, the hero’s insight occurs, which is facilitated by all the artistic and aesthetic means of the work.
“5/4 on the Eve of Silence” by Galaktionova can be called a novel-poem or a novel-symphony. The latter definition apparently contradicts the jazz time signature in the title. But let’s think about it, let’s listen to the movement of the author’s thought - through the change of sound images, the graceful play with sizes, scales, “intermediate states of nature” of things. The main character, the new Russian Tsakhilganov, is immersed in a “lived-in, slightly sad, complicated symphonic jazz– a musical product of pleasant spiritual disorientation.” This “pleasant disorientation” of the hedonistic hero is replaced by the author’s sharp rejection of the “wild African rhythm” as a “spiritual drug.” From " symphonic jazz" is repressed, eliminated - by all the matter of the super-intense novel action - a lighter beginning: what remains symphonic-nyia, high polyphony, fusion of diverse voices, which leads to the identification of a philosophical dominant in the dispute between competing musical styles. This is an ancient church chant that the hero’s young daughter, who hates her father’s way of life, is carried away by, but is forced to exist in the world he has built. In its alternative reality, fusion reigns as the ideal of spiritual harmony: “In ancient Russian church chants, one such strict covenant was observed, well - for all centuries, in general, there was such a covenant - to fulfill them (i.e. stichera. - Auto.) monophonically. Don't double or triple. For seditious two- and three-voices will then certainly break the unity of people, and therefore the common one. The indivisible power of the people!
The fusion and confrontation of styles meets a single author’s goal: recreate the tension of the worldon the verge of collapse- the confrontation between the unlived past of the “country of martyrs and rapists”, the “country of forced holiness” and the split present, unclear future (“tomorrow it will become a country of forced universal sin”). Hence the state of “on the eve” of the end, given by the title of the novel? apocalypse? or a new, unknown harmony? The novel's tension carries obvious ideological meanings, the pathos of a warning: “Russia has always been plugging the creative veins of its people with terrible blood clots of need! And it’s not because of poverty. And so... And this giant russianvoltage, which does not find a way out during life, it will still hit the prosperous.”
The refrain that permeates the entire narrative canvas is “Love dies”, “while Love lives”... Love here is both an eternal life category and the name of the woman, the wife of the protagonist. All of the novel's action, frantic reflection, actions and memories of Tsakhilganov are concentrated in a single moment - lasting for several years - of waiting, of endlessly maintaining the fading life of his terminally ill wife, confined to a hospital bed.
The innovation of this experimental poem in prose is determined not only by the deliberate - to the point of sharp implausibility - contrast of the imprinted here-being, but also by a clear forceful shift of the Center: to some small peripheral point, which turns out to be - in an ontological, existential sense - vitally essential. This point is the place where Love either dies or is resurrected, where the lost hero of our time fights for life. After all, according to surveyors, it is there, to the hospital center, that the center of present-day Eurasia is shifting:
“But everything moved again in time, and new people reported new underground unknown shifts, and everything was measured and recounted -
and – the center – of Eurasia – converged – on that – very –
point - where - dies - Love...”
A novel permeated with such special speech digressions, where playing with the Word takes on a phenomenological meaning, highlighting the philosophical essence of the spoken Word, is not easy to read and comprehend. Digital symbolism, graphic highlighting of phrases and words, revealing their internally ambivalent meaning (for example, “short-sighted” = “not - far - but - visible”), is combined with sound writing, rhythmic and musical discourses, forming inflorescences of a dismembered but unified being - of being-as-it-itself-is.
The discovery of the 2000s was Zakhar Prilepin, author of the novels “Pathologies” (2004), “Sankya” (2006), the cycle of stories “Sin” (2007), the research novel from the ZhZL series “Leonid Leonov. His acting was enormous” (2010), as well as collections of short stories, essays, articles and interviews.
Obviously, the most significant work of this author is “Sankya”: a novel about modern Russia and its eternal revolutionary ferment, about the young generation of people who seem to be held in this life by nothing except “an innate sense of self-worth.” Also, their code of “normal, indivisible boyish concepts” included such a word as “Motherland.” That decided it all.” Having united in the political organization “Union of Creation”, they oppose social inequality and their own exclusion from the vicious circle of life, where all places are distributed among the rich, successful, and predatory. “A disgusting, dishonest and stupid state that killed the weak, gave freedom to the vile and vulgar - why tolerate it? Why live in it, every minute betraying yourself and every citizen?” - this is the range of questions to which the hero and his like-minded people devote their lives and fate.
The space of the novel is filled with scenes of rallies and battles with law enforcement agencies, acts of retaliation on the part of the “allies” and, in the end, a depiction of their desperate but doomed attempt to take power in the country into their own hands. Before us - novel-warning, reconstructing a possible explosion of destructive forces accumulated in society. Although, from this point of view, Prilepin’s book, despite all its topicality, is quite traditional and, entering the literary chronicle of the growth of revolutionary sentiments in Russia, is consonant with M. Gorky’s “Mother” (the story of his son Paul, who takes the path of struggle). And in the protest literature of the 1990s - 2000s - V. Rasputin’s story “Ivan’s Mother, Ivan’s Daughter”, where many semantic lines are drawn to the image of the son of the rebellious Tamara Ivanovna.
The plot points to this - the relationship between Sanka and his mother, however, in its downtroddenness and depression by fate, it is not at all similar to Tamara Ivanovna - although the very nature of these relationships and the image of the hero-son emerging in a protest-ridden environment are reminiscent of Gorky's decision. Accurately captured type of "hero of our time" and there is in “Sanka” is the author’s main discovery, saving from the costs of traditionalism and giving its name to the novel about the new generation. Sanka is the son of an early deceased philosopher and a victim of spiritual fatherlessness, a rebel and a faithful ally of his party comrades (for him, “the best people on Earth”); drives him acute feeling kinship with neighbors and the search for something that can somehow fill the frozen emptiness of a world that has been torn apart under the crushing foot of history. This search includes not only fierce resistance to the pressure of being-without-being, but also tender feelings: love for his comrade-in-arms Yana, touching memories of rural childhood, pity for the unfortunate mother...
However, the novel's space is split, irrevocably divided into a bright past and a gloomy present, a cold, joyless city and a dying village - love and hatred, finally. All these contrasting spheres gravitate towards a single ideological center: a sharp, like a furious cry of protest, division of the entire world of young rebels into “our own”, to whom they are faithful, ready to give their lives, and “strangers”, with whom, according to the laws of honor, one must wage an inexorable, tough fight. The forms of this struggle, as the plot of the novel shows, leave much to be desired: rather, it is a means to somehow fill an existence in which ordinary human values - family, work, home, etc. - seem to have no meaning. “There’s simply nowhere to go,” one of the “allies” with whom Sanka will be destined to share his fate formulates his position. A series of rallies and persecutions, political demarches and senseless fights, acts of protest and retaliatory arrests and beatings ends with Yana’s farcical attack on the president in the theater. Before us is a sad parody of the assassination attempt on Karakozov: the current punisher douses the unwanted head of state... with a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup, etc. The retaliatory punitive actions of the authorities provoke the final attempt of the “allies”...
Key words and concepts for understanding the novel are the “emptiness” of a world without humanity and spiritual kinship, without a past and future, the “lightness” of youth and the dangerous game it started, giving way to the “heaviness” of forced violence, as well as the iconic particles “without”, “not ”, etc. - create semantic lines along which the reader’s perception passes. The sphere of denial also includes the “talking” names of the people around Sanka: Without letov, Not negative, etc. The result of negation is the “righteous mayhem” committed by the rebels at the end of the novel, which determines its tragic sound. Nevertheless, the very personality of the main character, destined, according to the structure of his soul, for a completely different, normal life, sets the reader’s resistance to total denial, cathartically leading to one immutable idea: “Russia Not died"...
The cycle of stories “Sin” presents us with a completely different, although always similar to himself, Prilepin - a philosopher and artist trying to capture the subtlest, elusive matter of Life. However, as in “Sanka”, his style of thinking here is a movement traditional for Russian literature from a fragile idyll trembling in the unsteady wind of existence - to its inevitable destruction. More precisely, self-destruction - despite all the heroes’ efforts to maintain balance and harmony, this natural, like the breath of love, lightness of being...
The unity of the “Sin” cycle and its success among the reader is again based on the choice of the hero: this is a Remarque-Hemingway type, a little pose, a little reminiscence, but behind the whole flair one can see both autobiographical poignancy and anxiety for the fate of another “lost” in the vast expanses of Russia generations. The “through” hero of the cycle acutely feels his happiness - such a simple pleasure to live, love, eat, drink, breathe, walk... to be young. Let us note that this is the feeling of a purely idyllic hero. As soon as it leaves, the idyll is destroyed. That’s why the author in the cycle always balances on the edge: his hero, turning around different faces(socio-psychological, professional - from a poor journalist to a gravedigger and a soldier, emotional - from love to enmity and hatred), he goes through a variety of states: love on the verge of death (“What day of the week will happen”), related feelings on the verge of incest (“What day of the week will happen”), family feelings on the verge of incest (“What day of the week will happen”) Sin"), male friendship on the verge of hatred (“Carlson”), a sense of community on the verge of complete loneliness (“Wheels”), confrontation with others on the verge of self-destruction (“Six Cigarettes and so on”), family happiness on the verge of split (“Nothing will happen”), childhood on the verge of oblivion (“White Square”), feelings of homeland on the verge of unconsciousness (“Sergeant”).
It's all meta transitional time– it is not without reason that the cycle begins with the fixation of its movement, which in itself appears as a co-existence. According to Prilepin, time is inextricably linked with a person, and life itself, its living is co-existence of being. Therefore, every moment and incarnation is significant, despite the outward smallness and apparent meaninglessness. And the elusive matter of existence acquires, in the subject sphere of the hero, tangible reality, “physically” weighty, real forms. “The days were important - every day. Nothing happened, but everything was very important. Lightness and weightlessness were so important and complete that huge heavy feather beds could be made from them.”
The given examples of modern prose reveal the changes that traditional realism has undergone in its assimilation of the new historical reality. It is obvious that realistic consciousness is now characterized by elements of the unreal, conditional, subjective - everything that “according to the rules” is attributed to the sphere of modernism and even postmodernism. Nevertheless, the difference between the latter is fundamental and great. If modernism, breaking through the semiotic veils to the ontological principles of Being, seeks - and finds! - behind the collapse of traditional forms, the spiritual supports of human existence in a rapidly changing world and, thus, through creative intuition, a creative act, a high theological meaning is discerned in History and Tragedy, then postmodernism is fundamentally atheistic, more precisely, a(theo)logical (after all atheism is also a kind of creed). If the first, by artistic will, transforms Chaos into Cosmos or, at least, in catastrophic fractures guesses the ordering synergistic force, its goal-setting meaning, then the second only records in human consciousness the loss of any point of support - be it God, the laws of nature or the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism . As I. Khasan noted, not without irony, postmodernists, recognizing decay as almost the only given fact immanent to the world (i.e., as a peculiar norm of human existence), settled quite comfortably in the chaos they constituted and even imbued with a “sense of comfort” towards it.
It is still difficult to judge the ways of development of literature of the new century, to make encouraging (or pessimistic?) forecasts. But to identify an ever-increasing trend towards meeting of realism and modernism in one text, the transformation of the first to the point of unrecognizability and the rapid development of the second is necessary now. However, the idea of synthesis is not new, but until now its clear criteria are chronologically closed and linked to the work of writers of the past (Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Leonov, Kataev, Dombrovsky). Today we can talk about the formation neomodernism, the features of which now more deeply and clearly express what is habitually called “artistic convention,” but in fact is already included in the very concept of “reality,” refers to the author’s mastery of the irrational, the ontology of the soul: not with dry rational knowledge, but with creative intuition. All this opens up new opportunities for penetration into the “hidden reality”: the supersensible and superrational - primary in its essence - reality of Russia, the Russian man in the “supernova” world of shifted values of the recent past and, hopefully, returning values of the eternal. The “new focus of faith and peace,” which K. Clark denies Russian literature, is not a dogma introduced by a refined mind. Rather, it is a necessary effort of the heart and soul - the soul of those who seek and find themselves in the world and peace in themselves.
Clark K. Soviet novel: history as ritual. Ekaterinburg, 2002. P. 237.
Bondarenko V. Moscow School" or the era of timelessness. M., 1990. S. 79, 81, 83.
Neologism from the abbreviation “ASU” - “automatic control system”.
Heidegger M. Time and Being. Articles and speeches. M., 1993. P. 192.
Bolshakova A. Phenomenology of literary writing. About the prose of Boris Evseev. M., 2003. S. 5–6, 11, 126–127.
Hassan I. Paracriticism: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana, 1975. P. 59.
Clark K. S. 237.
Instructions
for those who are going to answer any question,
associated with the characterization of the situation in modern literature
1. Who needs this instruction and why?
As the world becomes more and more mass media(which is not least due to the growing popularity of the journalist profession - especially when there is less and less news), then there are more and more people in the world who it makes sense to interview. And, if the sphere of literary artistic creativity has not yet rested in peace, then it sometimes falls under the attentive gaze of journalists.
There is nothing more conservative than the procedure for the exercise of two of the oldest professions - prostitution and journalism, where little has changed over the centuries. And since we will not talk about the first, but about the second, let us recall that the most popular form of a journalist addressing a particular person of interest is an interview. And the more media there are, the more established writers are required, as well as new writers who are “discovered” to the public by one or another media outlet, the more people have to speak from the platform of one or another media outlet - as a writer, literary critic or expert - answering questions from journalists. One of the favorite questions of journalists in such cases, in addition to the question of creative plans, of portraying themselves and their acquaintances as heroes, as well as the question of the relationship between personal life and creativity, is a question concerning the current situation in literature. It has many types and appears under different guises, but its meaning is approximately the same: How would you characterize the situation in modern literature? What is modern literature? What place do you see for yourself in modern literature? etc. Previously, everyone, at their own peril and risk, got confused in the answer to this question, wandering in a dark room of an unknown house, wandering blindfolded and stumbling upon the tricky implications hidden in the questions of journalists. But today, when there are more and more journalists, and less and less background, as well as more and more of those who are forced - whether he wants it or not - to answer questions of this kind, we decided to fill this glaring gap, somewhat standardizing the procedure.
The following instructions are intended to make it easier to answer the question about the current literary situation. We advise those who will be interviewed tomorrow to read it in order to be well prepared for the answer. We advise those who have already answered this question to familiarize themselves with their past answer in order to avoid typical mistakes in the future. We advise those who are already a writer, but who have not yet been interviewed, to read the instructions, because an interview can be taken in the most unexpected and original place, taking you by surprise. We also advise those who are not yet writers to read the instructions, because they can become writers in a completely unexpected and original situation - the more media there are, the greater the need to recognize writing achievements for achievements that are less and less related to literary activity. In general, you should be on your guard. We hope that our instructions will close this glaring gap in the existing state of affairs of the modern literary situation, and you will always be ready to answer a journalist’s question concerning it, even if he sneaks up on you in the middle of the night to get from you an answer that you yourself cannot answer. counted.
It should be clarified that sometimes journalists ask not about the situation in literature in general, but about a specific situation (in a city, village, club, etc.). Despite the fact that our instructions are designed more for answers about the situation in general, nevertheless, with proper attention, it can also be used to answer specific questions. However, the procedure for specifying the answer in accordance with the question is not part of the purpose of this instruction. We remind you that, in any case, general answers can be given to each specific question.
2. Structure of this manual
This instruction consists of two parts. In the first part, which should be considered explanatory, we will tell you how to use the second part. In the second part, which should be called practical, we will give several ready-made answers to the question about the situation in modern literature. Accordingly, the first part explains how these answers can be used depending on the need, situation, temperament, character, time, place, climate, gender, age, sexual orientation, height, foot size, eye color, length of nails and hair, tone of voice and his various intonations, etc.
I. Explanatory part of the instructions
I. I. What and how should you refuse in case of the best answer
Anyone who would like to begin to answer the question about modern literature, in the best In this case, he would have to take care - before the answer itself - to understand what modernity, literature is, and what their situation may be.
This should be done regardless to the huge abundance of information, articles and books about modernity in its two senses (modernity and contemporary), about their differences from each other (in the sense, for example, that modernity is the proper name of a historical era that has already ended, and contemporary is that the era that is currently underway, regardless of what it is called). Don't look This abundance is quite simple - for this you can simply not read all of it. The matter is complicated by the fact that there are people for whom it is easier to read than not to read. But even in this case, they can overcome themselves; it is enough to attend the anniversary of relatives, visit their parents, buy a house in the village or a domestic car, as well as contact the appropriate services, which will always find something to keep you busy so that you don’t read these books about modernity in its various senses.
You should also understand the question, despite the common knowledge that is always ready for our services ( common to the extent universal recognition) the meaning of “modernity”, the unclear outlines of which (and with everything common, the outlines are always vague) vary, meanwhile, what's heard(on the eye, on the tongue, on other places of the human body), so what's fashionable And what are they talking about that it is modern and that that it’s clear that this is modern, but this is not. And, if books about what modernity is can still be ignored without reading them, then it is not so easy to get rid of the common idea of modernity, not to mention the impossibility of its banal “ignorance” (“disregard”). Why? Because it belongs to us much less than we belong to it.
At best (if the best answer) we are not talking about deliberate denial, ignoring, destruction, but only about own understanding modern literature and its situation to those who are going to speak about it. But it may seem that your own understanding is somehow destructive ( refuse from this, Not looking at something else is all denial), and therefore a positively minded person can try to answer the question without this destructive understanding. Let's call the non-understanding answer positive.
I. II. ABOUT positive And truly positive answers
Let's try to tune in to a positive wave. To understand is, as you know, from the word “to catch”, and also very close to “to accept”. The recipe for a positive response is very simple: we take something from popular belief and present it as our answer, and then a scheme operates that, in terms of the persuasiveness of its positive attitude, is equal to Descartes’ formula: If I said this, then that’s what I understand.
This approach sometimes gives amazing results, because most often you can hear from yourself something like “wow! and I never thought that I always thought that way.” Is this not automatic writing, in whose magical method some writers of the first half of the twentieth century so relied?
However, for a completely positive answer, you shouldn’t raise the bar of intellectual requirements so much by introducing some conditions for catching a positive wave ( if I said it, it means I understood). Genuine positivity is unconditional and direct like a baby, it does not have to think, much less use this scheme of implication (if-then). In case true positivity the respondent immediately proceeds to describe and characterize the modern literary situation, passing over as “self-evident” the understanding that what exactly is this?? In this case, the journalist is flattered by the fact that he, the one asking the question, is credited with complete understanding by the answerer, and therefore, most likely, he will not clarify the question with additional tricks. Example: “what do you say about the modern literary situation?”, answer: “everything is bad” or “everything is wonderful,” and then you can proceed to the next question).
Thus, our instructions end for those who are ready to answer positively and truly positively to the question about the modern literary situation (which, by the way, explains its small circulation).
Please note: understanding what it actually is - the modern literary situation - does not presuppose the only correct answer for all times and for all people, however, it assumes that the interlocutor understands the question, which means: there is something that is being asked about, and responder understands this. Thus our instruction returns to those who wish to understand what he is talking about.
I. III. What is understood is always unrecognizable to those who understand
Understanding a question means doing a lot of work to understand the subject of the question, which, first of all, does not consist of finding something, accepting it and retelling it as one’s own. To understand is, at a minimum, to understand that we something is always already accepted, and we always ready to mindlessly reproduce something, either being aware of this or not (positive and truly positive cases of response, see paragraphI. II. this manual). And to understand means to understand that the thoughtless reproduction of what we have already accepted much easier than your own understanding. That is: It’s easier to answer a difficult question than to think about the answer.
Thus, to understand the question yourself is, first of all, be able to question accepted by us without our consent in advance and ready to fall from our lips as an answer. The understood person, therefore, always has an appearance unrecognized by anyone - first of all, unrecognized by the understander himself.. It’s quite simple to check: when we discover something new for ourselves, and hesitantly express it among our friends, then among them there will always be someone who will say that “this is already clear” (and so much so that it was not worth mentioning even talk), and the other will say that this is all you always talked about, and therefore it is unclear why you are now so unsure of yourself; It’s another matter that a journalist must pretend that he is someone you know who is interested in any word that comes out of your lips, even a curse.
I. IV. The difference between responsibility for a statement and reporting for it
In case positive the answer to the question of the literary situation lies only in the person conveying the popular idea report that he is passing it on, but there is no responsibility;
In case truly positive answer to the question about the literary situation, neither the report nor the responsibility lies with the one conveying the popular idea, since he truly positive
Responsibility for a statement appears where the question of the source of the statement is raised not as a third party to the speaker himself (then he is only a transmitter), but about yourself as this very source - regardless of whether anyone said so before or not.
I. V. About how important it is after reproducing a banality to add “IMHO”
Hundreds and hundreds of people say banal things that they do not understand (neither them nor what they are talking about) - and because how exactly they say, it’s clear how much they don’t understand What They say. These positive responses characterize them not only as interview subjects, but also as writers - they truly positive. When they say these things, they pass them off as their thoughts: “I think so,” “at least I think so,” or, in a much more laconic form: “imho.” However, in this case, this false closure of the popular and only opinion you convey is precisely a clear indication that the source of my statement is not me, and, nevertheless, the same clear indication that this source is felt, and, moreover, has the amazing power to endow its owner with the status of a Creative Personality. The higher the degree of banality of the statement, under which the words “I think so” are placed, the stronger the connection to the sacred circle of Creative Personalities, very close to the circle of truly positive people.
You can also go the opposite way: find out what Creative Personalities have already said and pass it on as your own words. There is a high probability that their words spoken by you will be recognized as your own, and you will be known as a Creative Personality. In this case, no copyrights are violated, since it is no less likely that their words, which you read and took for yourself, they also already read somewhere and also took for themselves. In addition, if the journalist already knows that these words are not yours, then he will be all the more imbued with respect for you, since you pronounce those words that only real Creative and truly positive people say, and pronounce them as your own.
I. VI. Some long sentence
which we did not understand, but in which we are talking about literature,
and, in addition, there is a logical transition to the further,
and therefore we decided to leave it in the instructions,
separating it into a separate paragraph
After all that has been said, you should turn to what will take practical part of the instructions: to common assumptions and opinions, from which they proceed as obvious (and the more easily they spread in their ill-conceivedness and incomprehensibility - in fact, if “this is so,” then why even think about it?), but which - to those who want to give best the answer - should be questioned: not in order to make something of one’s own in spite of everyone, but at least in order to begin to recognize the complexity - no, not of the literary situation in modern times, and not of modern literature today, but - of itself literary affairs.
I. VII. Characteristics of the list of practical parts
These supposedly obvious premises of most of the unaccountable statements conveying the “general opinion” are given in the second (practical) part of our instructions without any systematization and without pretensions to completeness. The only criterion accessible to our understanding that we could find in this list is following from greater prevalence at the very beginning to more casual use at the end of the list, although this is very conditional.
Initially, the list contained more than a thousand items, but for the sake of compactness of this instruction, we limited ourselves to only one hundred provisions. For those who find this not enough, they can begin - after reading the hundredth position - to read the first, or choose them at random - until they remember them by heart. Even before this moment, the reader’s mind will begin to automatically form more and more new points, and here it will be necessary to regret not so much the incompleteness of the list on paper, but its excessiveness in one’s own head.
This list does not serve the purpose of any “exposure”. We recommend that anyone who discovers them try to question them. Pay attention to this soft form: “we recommend trying,” because it is very difficult to really question them; at first it will seem that the doubter has found himself in an unknown forest, in a world without signs, and he will immediately want to escape from it, which many “trying” will do right away, saying to themselves: “well, yes, it’s not clear why these provisions are called prejudices in this instruction - after all, that’s how it is.”
In fact, who would prefer the discomfort of responsible understanding to the sterile (and in a truly positive case, completely vague) transmission of various kinds of banalities, in which one is already comfortable?
I. VIII. A digression on the ability of doubt
We remind you that doubt is not exposure, and serves only the purposes of one’s own understanding. In addition, the discomfort of genuine doubt cannot be fully experienced by everyone, because if each of us is ready to doubt everything, anything, then not everyone is ready to doubt themselves. And it is precisely from this - from the fact that I am already ready to consider as mine what does not belong to me, and therefore I should doubt that it is easier for me to pass off as mine, this is precisely where it all begins. And therefore it will seem that doubt in these elements, which are so easily found, means self-destruction and the loss of all possible coordinates. But what actually looks like self-destruction is actually a cleansing of what is alien to oneself and an attempt to approach oneself for the first time. But who needs him himself if he can do without him? Moreover, if you are a writer, and you can easily and painlessly question everything around you, and instead of yourself, always give truly positive answers, recognizable by journalists and fitting you into the circle of Creative Personalities?
I. IX. Reminder of the subject of this manual
Each of the prejudices outlined in the practical part of the instructions has many protagonists. As it becomes clear from our instructions, some of these protagonists are truly positive people, some are people who are self-aware and therefore positive, some even belong to the host of Creative People. However, we do not name them, since none of these opinions and assumptions that guide the answer to the question about the modern literary situation is not any of these people's own understanding. After all, one of the signs of true understanding is the formulation of a question and the impossibility of covering the entire subject area of the question with one statement. If we were to list here the names of the most famous protagonists, then, after what has just been said, it would look as if we wanted to reproach them for misunderstanding. But is this really a reproach? A bad deed, an intolerable character, a garlicky smell from the mouth (why exactly that?), sticky palms are reproached, but who reproaches others for the fact that a person chose not to understand something? Or even that a person did not understand, that he chose not to understand where he should have understood? In the matter of understanding, the presumption of innocence works better than in criminal proceedings.
In addition, do not forget that we are interested in item- the modern literary situation, the subject, not the people. This subject, however, engages people only to the extent that they themselves (or think that they themselves) specifically talk about it, undertake to teach others, and still manage to earn symbolic capital from this. The reasons for this phenomenon are discussed in detail in clause 1 of this instruction, where it is obvious to everyone that writers are not the only ones to blame for the existence of this subject.
I. X. Understanding means changing the situation
I. XI. Other people's words about the same thing
Maybe by mistake, or maybe out of laziness, there will be those positive people who, having read our instructions to this point, will immediately ask a counter-question: “how can this understanding help?” and they will immediately give a truly positive answer to it: “after all, it is obvious that whether you understand or not, everything remains the same.” We will use their own weapons here, and quote someone else’s words from the Nobel speech delivered in 1989 by Camilo José Cela:
“And if we want to be free, we will build our world in much the same way as if we were already free.”
Anyone who does not understand how understanding can help us does not yet understand what understanding is, although he acts and speaks like this, as if everything is already clear. Our instructions are intended to save its attentive reader from this unnecessary “as if”.
I. XII. Methods of use practical parts
There are four ways to use practical parts of this instruction, according to which four types of readers can be distinguished. We call the first two methods - in accordance with the classification adopted in this instruction - positive, the second two - understanding. In addition, there is also special way concerning the invention manifestos.
I. XIII. Positive ways to use practical parts
1. When reading quickly, fluently, arm yourself with one, several or all provisions practical parts. The method of such reading is typical for the “pig” type, since this animal is an omnivore, but, in the presence of more prosperous options, the pig, like any other intelligent animal, will prefer what most matches its inner world and what it wants most now.
2. Read all the points in a row and conclude that modern literature, like the situation in it, is polyphonic, multicultural, etc. The method of such reading is characteristic of the “light bulb” type, since moths of different species beat against it at night, but these moths remain to it as if it belonged to itself, that is, before the light bulb. The light bulb illuminates everything around, but with the same success it can illuminate anything else around.
I. XIV. Understanding ways to use practical parts
3. Read all the points in a row and think about the fact that the conversation about modern literature and the situation in modern literature, which occurs with the use of all these and similar points, no longer makes sense, that it cannot continue in the same way - and abandon it forever, declaring, at the very least, that “everything is complicated” and “I am not ready to answer this question.” So the respondent already begins to realize that What they ask him. This will be much better preparation for an interview than mindlessly repeating items from a list or the like. This method of reading corresponds to the type of “player” - avoiding the answer with reference to the complexity of the situation, “I don’t play like that anymore.” The player refuses to play where they cheat, where it is obvious that there are inconsistencies in the rules of the game, party affiliation and other things, which you can get an impression of from reading the list practical parts can be done without much difficulty.
4. Read carefully practical part, stopping at each point and trying to extract the subject - the situation of modern literature - in application to each of them, namely, refusing to accept and understand this situation as these theses suggest. If the subject - the situation of modern literature - is not extracted in this way, then you should try to understand it yourself, or forever recognize its emptiness - and bury it under the rubbish of these “generally accepted positions”. We remind you that in this case, in parallel with carefully reading these points, work will be done to extract myself, buried under the rubbish of these - and countless others - “generally accepted provisions.” Such work most corresponds to the preparatory and accompanying stage of any literary activity, and therefore we will call this method of reading “writer’s”.
I. XV. Special way usage: make a manifesto
The following points can also be used to compose literary manifestos. In this case, you need to choose from the list what you like - it will be basic position, and then - all other provisions that do not contradict the main one ( traditional manifesto) or those that contradict it ( vanguard manifesto). This way of reading corresponds to a type so truly positive that we can simply call him “insane,” like everyone who still writes manifestos of literary groups and has not yet understood that literature is always case one person, even if he creates the whole world. Quite the contrary: only one person can create an entire world. The unification of people in literature has never created something that would be smaller than each of them.
I. XVI. Developer Promises
The developers of this manual acknowledge the somewhat outdated nature of its paper form and apologize for the fact that it should be read and, worse, thought. However, they hope that this flawed nature of the instruction will be excused by the fact that it closes the most important gap in the modern literary situation. In turn, they threw all their energy into programming an automatic generator of answers to questions about the modern literary situation, which will be available in all mobile devices without exception, including office calculators, players, car navigators and even taxi meters, since ( see point 1 of this instruction) the question about the current situation in literature can be asked at any time and by anyone, and our goal is to protect the unprepared mind of modern writers, critics and experts from the furious information attack of third parties. If someone thinks that we have approached the matter too formally, and the automatic generator will produce irresponsible answers, then the developers responsibly declare: this is precisely their goal ideally, because the question about the modern literary situation should receive truly positive answers, so that the modern literary situation becomes better and better every day.
II. Practical part instructions
1. There is no such thing as “modern literature”.
2. Modern literature is worse than past literature.
3. Modern literature is much more significant than the literature of the past.
4. Current situation is very different from the situation of past times, and therefore modern literature is very different from past literatures.
5. Modern literature is no different from any other.
6. The literature of the past cannot help modern literature in any way.
7. Modern literature borrows everything from beginning to end from the literature of the past.
8. Modern literature must seek its own path, only then will it enter into dialogue with tradition.
9. All that modern literature has at its disposal are the resources of the literatures of the past, from which it - in free play - forms itself.
10. Modern literature has developed (is developing, will certainly develop soon) its own special style, which we will call “the style of modern literature” or even “the style of the era.”
11. Modern literature has its own inimitable style, even if it does not know it.
12. Modern literature does not have any style - do not consider the motley mixture of the styles of previous literature as such, the eclecticism of modernity is not a style.
13. Modern literature is dead, because no one reads it and no one needs it.
14. Modern literature is more alive than all living things, it is on the verge of flourishing and its unprecedented surge - an era of literary triumph will soon await us.
15. The situation of modern literature is characterized by unprecedented freedom - in themes, plots, methods of writing, everyone can do what they want, an unlimited flow of creativity.
16. Modern literature is very strictly limited in its scope by the achievements of past eras, and therefore it is forced to uncreatively repeat the past, endlessly remixing, paraphrasing, composing and making remakes - in relation to its great predecessors.
17. Modern literature is very strictly limited in its framework by the achievements of past eras, and therefore it is forced to look for its own Self, albeit narrow, limited, but its own, because its own is when it is not someone else’s.
18. Modern literature must reflect social reality and convey it correctly.
19. Modern literature does not owe anyone anything and it is a free flight of imagination, creativity and only at best entertains the tired, serious people of our world.
20. Modern literature must respond to the socio-political challenges of its time, exposing stupid conformism, corruption and irresponsibility of the authorities, outdated foundations, past and now false values.
21. Modern literature must respond to the socio-political challenges of its time, exposing those who expose stupid conformism, corruption and irresponsibility of the authorities, outdated foundations, former and today false values.
22. Modern literature must respond to the socio-political challenges of its time, supporting and praising the true forces of our time: cozy conformism, readiness for dialogue and humanity of the authorities, unshakable traditions and enduring values.
23. Modern literature must respond to the socio-political challenges of its time, providing examples, teaching, and guiding its readers.
24. Modern literature must respond to the socio-political challenges of its time, that is, first of all, entertain its readers.
25. Modern literature coexists among other modern arts - photography, cinema, computer games etc. - and therefore is forced to take into account their achievements, assimilate in order to be - yourself, recognized, competitive, sane, just be, etc.
26. Modern literature must confront modern arts.
27. Modern literature should ignore modern arts.
28. Modern literature is not modern.
29. Modern literature can only be national, since we live in an era of globalization, and literature is a means of forming the identity of a people, its historical memory.
30. Modern literature can only be international, since we live in an era of globalization, and literature is a means of forming the identity of a people, its historical memory.
31. Modern literature is literature in electronic formats; it is read differently and written differently than the previous one.
32. Modern literature is literature in electronic formats, and therefore it is free from copyright: the author has long been dead, and now the book carrier has also died.
33. Modern literature lives only because it has not yet switched to electronic format and values the paper book most of all.
34. Modern literature is experimental and avant-garde.
35. Modern literature is conservative in nature.
36. Modern literature requires fast reading, because now is the time for high speeds.
37. Modern literature is designed for the sophisticated intellectual and erudite, for the level of education is now higher than ever before.
49. Modern literature is a fiercely competitive environment, but only for itself, and ordinary people don’t care about it.
50. Literary awards show the best in modern literature and work for it.
51. Literary awards are not at all an indicator of modern literature and serve some outside interests.
52. Words such as artist, creativity, work and others from the set of pathetic vocabulary of the century before last are unacceptable in modern literature; Now the time has come for art objects and performances. projects, not to mention hypertexts.
53. The situation of modern literature is characterized by the fact that we again hear such important words as artist, creativity, work and others, and it is good that all these art objects and performances have become a thing of the past. projects, not to mention the hypertexts of the last century.
54. Modern literature is no longer made by writers; it all - quite often - consists of ordinary people trying themselves in the field of writing.
64. Modern poetry is completely unrhythmic, does not rhyme, and therefore any kind of rubbish can be passed off as literature.
65. Modern poetry is completely unrhythmic, does not rhyme, and therefore you can no longer pass off any kind of rubbish as literature.
66. If someone read modern literature aloud, he would be convinced of its inconsistency.
67. If someone read modern literature aloud, he would be convinced of its superiority.
68. Modern literature is characterized a huge amount frankly graphomaniac works, and therefore it is very easy to single out several outstanding works against this background.
69. Modern literature is characterized by a huge number of openly graphomaniac works, and therefore it is completely impossible to single out any special book, or even a trend.
70. In the modern literary situation, everything has been captured by several clans in the capital, and the province is dying without government subsidies.
79. Today, in modern literature, there has been a rejection of all postmodern abstruse methods, and, most importantly, no more art for art’s sake, this is decadence leading to the liquefaction of the brain, and now everything should be said simply, sincerely.
80. Modern literature has finally abandoned the ghosts of soulfulness and simplicity, and today we see the flowering of what was once called art for art's sake, not least thanks to postmodernism.
81. Modern literature is me.
82. Modern literature is anyone, but not me.
83. In modern literature, as in all sectors of our society, the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy of homosexual officials dominates.
84. Today our literature is not visible, since the information space is cluttered with books by foreign authors, perhaps good ones, but not ours.
85. Today, our literature has finally come out ahead in translation - of the foreign authors, only the classics are sold en masse.
86. There can be no talk of any modern literature, because noteworthy circulations have ended with the collected works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism.
87. Modern literature, like everything modern, has lost authenticity, a sense of presence, and there are only intellectual games and erudition in it.
88. Modern literature, if it is truly modern, is comics, anime and computer games.
89. Modern literature does not please the gods, but neither do the gods please modern literature.
90. Modern writers are far from what could constitute the essence of modern literature.
91. Modern literature is a banana peel on the road of modern society: even if it hurts, it’s funny.
92. Most often, modern literature is a way to declare the psychological deviations of the writers themselves.
93. Read Leo Tolstoy.
94. Don't read Leo Tolstoy.
95. Modern literature is nothing more than an alternative version of something that in itself cannot have alternatives, and, as you see, its situation is hopeless.
96. Modern literature is an oxymoron, the same as: Pelevin is a writer.
97. Modern literature is a sane path to madness.
98. Modern literature is a crazy path to health.
100. We need to think about it.