What time period are we talking about when the term “modern Russian literature” is mentioned? Obviously, it dates back to 1991, receiving impetus for development after the collapse of the USSR. There is currently no doubt about the presence of this cultural phenomenon. Many literary critics agree that four generations of writers are behind its creation and development.
The sixties and modern literature
So, modern Russian literature did not arise out of nowhere immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain. This happened largely due to the legalization of the works of writers of the sixties, previously prohibited from publication.
The newly discovered names of Fazil Iskander became known to the general public (the story “Constellation of Kozlotur”, the epic novel “Sandro from Chegem”); Vladimir Voinovich (novel “The Adventures of Ivan Chonkin”, novels “Moscow 2042”, “Design”); Vasily Aksenov (novels “Island of Crimea”, “Burn”), Valentin Rasputin (stories “Fire”, “Live and Remember”, story “French Lessons”).
Writers of the 70s
Together with the works of the generation of disgraced freethinkers of the sixties, modern Russian literature began with books of authors of the generation of the 70s permitted for publication. It was enriched by the works of Andrei Bitov (the novel “Pushkin’s House”, the collection “Apothecary Island”, the novel “The Flying Monks”); Venedikt Erofeeva (prose poem “Moscow - Petushki”, play “Dissidents, or Fanny Kaplan”); Victoria Tokareva (collections of stories “When it became a little warmer”, “About what did not happen”); Vladimir Makanin (stories “A table covered with cloth and with a decanter in the middle”, “One and One”), Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (stories “Thunderstrike”, “Never”).
Writers initiated by perestroika
The third generation of writers - creators of literature - was awakened to creativity directly by perestroika.
Modern Russian literature has been enriched with new bright names of its creators: Viktor Pelevin (novels “Chapaev and Emptiness”, “Life of Insects”, “Numbers”, “Empire V”, “T”, “Snuff”), Lyudmila Ulitskaya (novels “Medea and her children”, “Kukotsky’s Case”, “Sincerely yours Shurik”, “Daniel Stein, translator”, “Green Tent”); Tatiana Tolstoy (novel “Kys”, collections of stories “Okkervil River”, “If you love - you don’t love”, “Night”, “Day”, “Circle”); Vladimir Sorokin (stories “The Day of the Oprichnik”, “Blizzard”, novels “Norma”, “Telluria”, “Blue Lard”); Olga Slavnikova (novels “Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog”, “Alone in the Mirror”, “2017”, “Immortal”, “Waltz with a Beast”).
New generation of writers
And finally, modern Russian literature of the 21st century has been replenished with a generation of young writers, whose work began directly during the state sovereignty of the Russian Federation. Young but already recognized talents include Andrei Gerasimov (novels “Steppe Gods”, “Razgulyaevka”, “Cold”); Denis Gutsko (the Russian-speaking dilogy); Ilya Kochergina (story “The Chinese Assistant”, stories “Wolves”, “Altynai”, “Altai Stories”); Ilya Stogoff (novels “Machos Don’t Cry”, “Apocalypse Yesterday”, “Revolution Now!”, collections of stories “Ten Fingers”, “Dogs of God”); Roman Senchin (novels “Information”, “Yeltyshevs”, “Flood Zone”).
Literary awards stimulate creativity
It is no secret that modern Russian literature of the 21st century is developing so rapidly thanks to numerous sponsorship awards. Additional motivation encourages authors to further develop their creativity. In 1991, the Russian Booker Prize was approved under the auspices of the British company British Petrolium.
In 2000, thanks to the sponsorship of the construction and investment company "Vistcom", another major award was established - "Natsbest". And finally, the most significant is the “Big Book”, established in 2005 by the Gazprom company. The total number of existing literary awards in the Russian Federation is approaching one hundred. Thanks to literary awards, the writing profession has become fashionable and prestigious; the Russian language and modern literature received a significant impetus to their development; the previously dominant method of realism in literature was supplemented by new directions.
Thanks to active writers (which manifests itself in works of literature), it develops as a communicative system through further universalization, that is, through the borrowing of syntactic structures, individual words, speech patterns from vernacular, professional communication, and various dialects.
Styles of modern literature. Popular literature
Works of modern Russian literature are created by their authors in various styles, among which mass literature, postmodernism, blogger literature, dystopian novel, and literature for clerks stand out. Let's take a closer look at these areas.
Mass literature today continues the traditions of entertaining literature of the end of the last century: fantasy, science fiction, detective, melodrama, adventure novel. However, at the same time, there is an adjustment to the modern rhythm of life, to rapid scientific progress. Readers of mass literature make up the largest share of its market in Russia. Indeed, it attracts different age groups of the population, representatives of various levels of education. Among works of mass literature, compared to books of other literary styles, there are most of all bestsellers, that is, works that have peak popularity.
The development of modern Russian literature today is largely determined by the creators of books with maximum circulations: Boris Akunin, Sergei Lukyanenko, Daria Dontsova, Polina Dashkova, Alexandra Marinina, Evgeny Grishkovets, Tatyana Ustinova.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism as a direction in Russian literature arose in the 90s of the last century. Its first adherents were writers of the 70s, and representatives of this trend contrasted realism with an ironic attitude towards communist ideology. They demonstrated in artistic form evidence of the crisis of totalitarian ideology. Their baton was continued by Vasily Aksenov “Island of Crimea” and Vladimir Voinovich “The Adventures of Soldier Chonkin”. Then Vladimir Sorokin and Anatoly Korolev joined them. However, Viktor Pelevin’s star shone brighter than all other representatives of this trend. Each book by this author (and they are published approximately once a year) gives a subtle artistic description of the development of society.
Russian literature at the present stage is developing ideologically thanks to postmodernism. His characteristic irony, the dominance of chaos over order inherent in changes in the social system, and the free combination of artistic styles determine the universality of the artistic palette of its representatives. In particular, Viktor Pelevin in 2009 was informally awarded the honor of being considered a leading intellectual in Russia. The originality of his style lies in the fact that the writer used his unique interpretation of Buddhism and personal liberation. His works are multipolar, they include many subtexts. Victor Pelevin is considered a classic of postmodernism. His books have been translated into all languages of the world, including Japanese and Chinese.
Novels - dystopias
Modern trends in Russian literature have also contributed to the development of the genre of the novel - dystopia, which is relevant during periods of changes in the social paradigm. The generic features of this genre are the representation of the surrounding reality not directly, but already perceived by the consciousness of the protagonist.
Moreover, the main idea of such works is the conflict between the individual and a totalitarian society of the imperial type. According to its mission, such a novel is a book of warning. Among the works of this genre one can name the novels “2017” (author - O. Slavnikova), “Underground” by V. Makanin, “ZhD” by D. Bykov, “Moscow 2042” by V. Voinovich, “Empire V” by V. Pelevin.
Blogger literature
The problems of modern Russian literature are most fully covered in the genre of blogger works. This type of literature has both common features with traditional literature and significant differences. Like traditional literature, this genre performs cultural, educational, ideological, and relaxation functions.
But, unlike it, it has a communicative function and a socialization function. It is blogger literature that fulfills the mission of communication between participants in the literary process in Russia. Blogger literature performs functions inherent in journalism.
It is more dynamic than traditional literature because it uses small genres (reviews, sketches, information notes, essays, short poems, short stories). It is characteristic that the blogger’s work, even after its publication, is not closed or complete. After all, any comment that follows is not a separate, but an organic part of the blog work. Among the most popular literary blogs on the Runet are the “Russian Book Community”, the “Discussing Books” community, the “What to Read?” community.
Conclusion
Modern Russian literature today is in the process of its creative development. Many of our contemporaries read the dynamic works of Boris Akunin, enjoy the subtle psychologism of Lyudmila Ulitskaya, follow the intricacies of fantasy plots by Vadim Panov, and try to feel the pulse of time in the works of Viktor Pelevin. Today we have the opportunity to assert that in our time, unique writers create unique literature.
Contemporary Russian literature
(short review)
1. Background.
Book boom in Russia: more than 100,000 books a year. Difficulties in choosing a book.
"Modern" literature - after 1991
Background: 2 literatures in the USSR: official and unofficial. Lack of “mass” literature. Perestroika: the return of forgotten names, the truth about history, the birth of new literature from the underground. Literary disaster of 1992
2. Mass literature.
The birth of mass literature in the early 1990s. Genres of popular literature:
Detective. 1990s: Alexandra Marinina. 2000s: Daria Dontsova and Boris
Akunin.
- action movie: Alexander Bushkov, Viktor Dotsenko.
- "pink romance"
Thriller.
- fantastic. Sergei Lukyanenko. Dependence of popular literature on television series.
Growing interest in memoir literature and other forms of non-fiction.
New trends in mass literature since 2005:
- "glamorous" literature. Oksana Robski.
- "anti-glamorous" literature. Sergey Minaev.
- "investigation" novels. Yulia Latynina.
- Imitations of super bestsellers.
3. "Post-Soviet" literature.
The disappearance of “socialist realism” in the early 1990s. The growth of nostalgia for the USSR in the early 2000s. Rehabilitation of socialist realism. Alexander Prokhanov. Novel "Mr. Hexogen".
The phenomenon of “thick” literary magazines. Literature of realistic orientation. Traditions of the “liberal” Soviet literature of the “sixties”.
Middle-aged writers:
Dmitry Bykov. Novels “Justification”, “Spelling”, “Tow Truck”, “J.-D.”
Andrey Gelasimov. The novel “The Year of Deception”, the story “Thirst”.
Olga Slavnikova. Novel "2017".
Alexey Slapovsky. Novels “Quality of Life”, “They”.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Novel "Daniel Stein, Translator".
"New realism".
Zakhar Prilepin. Novels “Pathologies”, “Sankya”, “Sin”.
4. Between realism and postmodernism
Older generation:
Tatiana Tolstaya. Novel "Kys".
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Novel “Number One or In the Gardens of Other Possibilities.” Vasily Aksenov. Novels “The Voltaireans and the Voltairians”, “Moscow-kva-kva”, “Rare Earths”.
Middle generation:
Mikhail Shishkin. Novels “The Capture of Ishmael”, “Hair of Venus”.
Aleksey Ivanov. Novels “The Heart of Parma”, “The Gold of Rebellion”.
5. Russian postmodernism.
The origins are in the underground of the 1970-1980s. Sotsart. Moscow conceptualism.
Dmitry Prigov.
Lev Rubinstein.
Vladimir Sorokin. Rise to fame in the late 1990s. Novels “Blue Lard”, “Ice Trilogy”, “Day of the Oprichnik”. Films “Moscow, “Kopeyka”. Opera "Children of Rosenthal".
"Younger" conceptualists:
Pavel Pepperstein, Oleg Anofriev “Mythogenic love of castes.”
"St. Petersburg fundamentalists."
Imperial theme.
Pavel Krusanov. Novels "Angel's Bite", "Bom-Bom", "American Hole".
Ironic line: Sergei Nosov. Novels “Hungry Time”, “The Rooks Flew Away”.
Victor Pelevin. Satire and Buddhism. Novels “Chapaev and Emptiness”, “Generation P”, “The Sacred Book of the Werewolf”, “Empire V”. Alexey Ivanov. Modern "fantasy" with historical. novels “The Heart of Parma”, “The Gold of Revolt” (about Pugachev’s uprising). Mikhail Shishkin (lives in Switzerland) “The Capture of Izmail 2000.” Russian Booker Prize. “Venus’ hair” (about the psychology of Russian people.)
Sergey Bolmat. Novels “On Our Own”, “In the Air”. Mikhail Elizarov. The story “Nails”, the novels “Pasternak”, “The Librarian”. Alexander Garros and Alexey Evdokimov. Novels "Inside Out", "Grey Goo", "The Truck Factor".
Main directions
in modern Russian literature
Nowadays it is becoming less and less common to hear voices shouting: “We have no literature.”
The concept " Modern literature“For many people, it is now associated not with the Silver Age and not even with the “village” prose of the 70s, but with today’s living literary process. The fact that literature is alive and will live is evidenced by several facts:
- firstly, these are literary prizes, large and small, well-known, such as the Booker Prize, and those just born, for example, named after Pushkin’s Ivan Petrovich Belkin, prizes that help talented writers survive and thoughtful readers get their bearings.
- Secondly, the incredible activity of book publishing. Now not only “thick” magazines are in a hurry for literary novelties, but also book publishing houses “Vagrius”, “Zakharov”, “Podkova”, etc. Often a book manages to be published before the last part of the same novel is published in a magazine, which creates healthy competition.
- Thirdly, literary fairs. Annual fairs of non/fiction intellectual literature in Moscow, book fairs of contemporary literature in the Ice Palace of St. Petersburg are becoming a real event; meetings with writers, round tables and discussions stimulate authors to write and readers to read.
- Fourthly, the literary Internet. Despite the fact that “setterature” differs in many ways from traditional “paper” literature, they are still close relatives, and the growing number of electronic libraries and literary sites, where every visitor is a reader, a writer, and a critic, where there are no “high authorities" and authorities, but there is only love for the word and text, testifies to the coming of a new literary generation.
What are the main trends and general patterns of Russian literature in 2001-2002?
Over the past two years, literature in Russia has continued to develop according to the same laws as throughout the last decade, its main directions:
- postmodernism,
- realism (in all its varieties),
- modernism
- neosentimentalism.
If we talk about the general patterns of the literary process of 2001-2002, then two points should be noted.
1. Postmodernism , as before, has a “secret” influence on all modern literature, but the balance of forces is changing. Just as it was once necessary to defend realism from postmodernism (in 1995, the Booker was awarded to Georgy Vladimov with his realistic novel “The General and His Army” as an edification to fans of the postmodernist Viktor Pelevin, who attacked the competition jury), so today postmodernism needs to be protected by the same Booker jury (jury members 2002, under the leadership of Vladimir Makanin, they stated: “Including the name of Vladimir Sorokin on the “short list” is in this case the only way to protest against the persecution of the writer, threatening him with judicial reprisal. We consider the creation of such a precedent unacceptable.”
2. Intensifies tendencies to blur boundaries
- between realistic and non-realistic trends in literature (a feature of most modern texts, most clearly in the works of Olga Slavnikova, Nikolai Kononov, Vera Pavlova, Natalia Galkina);
- between intellectual and mass literature (books by Boris Akunin, Tatyana Tolstaya).
between literary genres (“female detective” by Daria Dontsova, Tatyana Polyakova, etc., “detective & utopia & parody” by Holm Van Zaichik, etc.);
- between literature and extraliterary reality. (The extremist movement “Walking Together” and their actions of public destruction of the books of Vladimir Sorokin and Bayan Shiryanov is, on the one hand, and on the other, the blurring of the boundaries between literature and the reality outside it, which is taking place in the sphere of mass media.
- The use of advertising and PR technologies to “promote” writers and the implantation of paid advertising and PR messages into the fabric of artistic works is all a reality of recent years).
Let us now dwell on the analysis of the main trends in Russian literature over the past 2 years.
Postmodernism , which came from the underground to legal literature in the second half of the 80s under the name “other literature”, today continues to actively develop.
Founders of Russian postmodernism- these are poets Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Timur Kibirov, Ivan Zhdanov, Alexander Eremenko and others, prose writers Venedikt Erofeev, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Erofeev.
It should be noted that Russian postmodernism - be it the 70s or the 2000s - is characterized by a divisionpostmodern artistic strategies into 2 types:
- The first is “postmodernism as a complex of ideological attitudes and aesthetic principles”, and the second is “postmodernism as a manner of writing”, that is, “deep” postmodernism and “superficial”, when only its aesthetic techniques are used: “quotations”, language games, the unusual construction of the text, as in Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel “Kys” (2001). Hundreds of volumes have been written about postmodernism and more than 600 definitions have been given, but if you try to summarize, it turns out that postmodernism is a new type of consciousness, characterized by a global crisis in the hierarchy of values. The destruction of the hierarchy of values is based on the idea of equal size and equality of all elements of the Universe; there is no division into “spiritual” and “material”, into “high” and “low”, into “soul” and “body”. In postmodern literature, this phenomenon is expressed very clearly: the heroine of V. Narbikova’s story “The Balance of the Light of Day and Night Stars” speaks about love like this: “We love each other like: a dog, a potato, a mother, the sea, beer, a pretty girl, panties, a book , playboy, Tyutchev."The key concept of postmodernism is “the world as a text”“can be explained as follows: the world is unknowable, but is given to us as a description of this world, therefore it (the world) consists of a sum of texts and is itself a heterogeneous and endless text. A person can only perceive a text (description of the world), and his consciousness is also the sum of texts. Any work (and any consciousness) is part of this endless text. Hence the idea of polyquotation as a norm (there is no point in dividing into one’s own and someone else’s), experiments with the beginning/end of the text (both concepts are relative, since the text is endless), games with the reader (the world-text is anonymous, and therefore the author does not exist, the reader is as much an author as a writer).
Postmodern literature has been presented in a very diverse manner in the last 2 years. This is a literary game in the novels “Feast”, “Ice” by the patriarch of Russian postmodernism Vladimir Sorokin, where the author continues his destructive experiments with various styles. Mikhail Kononov in the novel “The Naked Pioneer” offers his own scandalous version of one of the chapters of his native history - the Great Patriotic War. Mikhail Elizarov, called by critics “the new Gogol,” publishes “Nails,” pseudo-nostalgic pseudo-memoirs that amaze with their musicality, organicity and richness of language. Anastasia Gosteva (“Travel-Lamb”, “The Den of the Enlightened”), a representative of the new women’s prose, writes postmodern texts dedicated to the peculiarities of the “addict” consciousness. Yulia Kisina’s book “Simple Desires” (St. Petersburg publishing house “Alethea”) also belongs to the new women’s prose, here the author (“Sorokin in a skirt”, according to some critics), deconstructs (dismembers) the holy of holies - childhood, which turns out to be not “pink”, but black and monstrous in essence. Human monstrosity is a cross-cutting theme in the work of Yuri Mamleev, known to readers from “Connecting Rods” and other books; his new novel “Wandering Time” was published in 2001. Dmitry Bykov’s sensational novel “Justification” surprisingly combines postmodern strategies for constructing a text (fantasy type of narration, playing “another story”) with traditionally realistic ones, designed for a “conservative” reader. Readers could get acquainted with the “philological” novels by Vladimir Novikov “A Novel with Language, or Sentimental Discourse”, Sergei Nosov “Mistress of History”, “Give Me a Monkey”, Valery Iskhakov “Chekhov’s Reader” and “A Light Taste of Treason”.
Contemporary modernism has its roots in the literature of the Silver Age. Most often, modern modernist authors, opposing themselves to the “literature of verisimilitude,” identify with postmodernist writers, but superficially, at the level of “postmodernism as a manner of writing.” The internal difference between modernism and postmodernism is that the vertical in the value system has not been destroyed: the classic division into “high” and “low”, “spiritual” and “material”, “brilliant” and “mediocre” has been preserved. The modern modernist text goes back to the Russian-language work of Vladimir Nabokov, while the postmodern text undoubtedly goes back to the works of Daniil Kharms. Tatyana Tolstoy's novel "Kys", which received the Triumph Prize for 2001, combined the features of intellectual and mass literature and became an event in the artistic life of Russia. A dystopian novel, a parody novel, a story about the life of a country that was once Russia, and now a settlement thrown back almost to the Stone Age by the Explosion. The author’s modernist strategy is manifested, on the one hand, in the rejection of the legacy of realistic traditions (this is the “unusual” form of organizing the novel - the alphabet, and the author’s language games with the reader, and postmodernist techniques), on the other hand, in the space of the novel “Kys” there is a certain Truth that the hero strives for, which is completely impossible in a postmodern novel. The parody of Tatyana Tolstoy's novel is not absolute: it ends where the area of Truth, Goodness and Beauty begins.
Modern Russian realism exists in several varieties, the first of which isneocritical realism. Its roots go back to the “natural school” of Russian realism of the 19th century, with its pathos of denying reality and depicting all aspects of life without restrictions. Modern naturalism, revived in the late 80s of the 20th century, is associated primarily with the name of Sergei Kaledin (“Humble Cemetery”, “Stroibat”). Many critics classify the prose of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya of the 70-90s, Svetlana Vasilenko (until 1995, according to the writer), and Vladimir Makanin as naturalism (and even “chernukha”). Among the new critical prose of 2001-2002. – Roman Senchin’s story “Minus”, depicting in the traditions of the natural school the hopeless life of a small Siberian town, Oleg Pavlov’s “army” story “Karaganda Nineties, or the Tale of the Last Days” (which, by the way, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), the story of abandoned village of Alexander Titov with a revealing name: “The Life That Never Was.” The pathos of texts conventionally classified as neocritical realism is pessimistic. Disbelief in the “high” destiny of man, the choice as a hero of a creature with a limited, narrowed, “drowsy”, according to the critic E. Koksheneva, consciousness - all this predetermines the basic patterns of style - heaviness, laconicism and deliberate artlessness of the style.
The second, now scarce, variety realism - ontological or metaphysical realism, which flourished in the 70s of the 20th century of Russian literature. The “village” prose of Vasily Belov, Valentin Rasputin and others has become a school of ontological realism for a group of today’s young writers. The philosophical and aesthetic essence of ontological realism can be reduced to the following: in human life there is a high, but hidden meaning that needs to be comprehended, and not sought and arranged for one’s own place in the sun. A Russian person can comprehend this meaning only through unity, through “conciliarity,” while any individual path is untrue. The key idea of ontological realists is “panpsychism”: the whole world surrounding a person is animated, and therefore realistic poetics in “village” prose coexist with symbolist ones. Today's new ontological realists are also looking not for the obvious cause-and-effect relationships of life phenomena, but for its mystical and sacred Christian meaning. Reality, which is understood as standing before the face of God, temporary in the light of Eternity, etc. As an example in the literature of the last two years, one can cite the prose of Lydia Sycheva, Yuri Samarin, Dmitry Ermakov, Olga Shevchenko, Yuri Goryukhin, Vladimir Bondar, where the common denominator is their religiosity, their Christian view of the world.
The third type of realistic wingRussian literature is post-realism The term, coined by scholar and critic Mark Lipovetsky, was coined to designate artistic attempts to comprehend the individual's existential duel with the chaos of life. Postrealism is open to postmodernist poetics, and, like today's modernists, writers Mikhail Butov, Irina Polyanskaya, Nikolai Kononov, Yuri Buida, Mikhail Shishkin also use the aesthetic techniques of postmodernism. However, first of all, post-realism is existential realism, with its idea of personal responsibility, the idea of freedom, requiring individual testing and trying on, the idea of connectedness and the belief in the incompleteness and insolubility of the individual’s duel with chaos. The novel “The Funeral of a Grasshopper” by Nikolai Kononov (one of the Apollo Grigoriev Prize winners) is a story about the hero’s childhood, about how his grandmother died, and he and his mother looked after her, with all the normal horrors of caring for a paralyzed woman. But naturalistic descriptions are harmonized by the language of the novel, its internal poetic rhythm, repetitions, and abundance of adjectives and subordinate clauses. The existential temperament of Nikolai Kononov's novel combined with sophisticated naturalism and poetic language results in the phenomenon of post-realism. Post-realistic poetics is characteristic of the work of Olga Slavnikova. Her latest work, one of the three laureates of the Apollo Grigoriev Prize, is “Immortal. A story about a real person." “Immortal” by Slavnikova, at first glance, is a phantasmagoria with the flavor of a furious pamphlet. The heroes of the story are poor provincials kicked out of the “usual” Soviet life. However, the sick, unhappy, sometimes scary residents of the Ural town paradoxically remain people, and all their terrible ghosts disappear when real pain, real death, real life appear. “The Immortal” is a scary book, but it is not at all an apology for fear. The reader hears the hidden music of hope, because the tragedy of an individual, unique person is associated with the tragic history of our country, and this history is unthinkable without multidimensional and free speech. Personality in an existential duel with the chaos of life, as we see, is an inexhaustible topic.
The next trend in Russian literature in recent years isneosentimentalism , the appearance of which is announced by almost all famous critics. This artistic trend is based on the traditions of sentimentalism of the 18th century. The ideal put forward by Nikolai Karamzin in “Poor Liza” is a sensitive person. Awareness of the value of the simple feelings of a private, “small”, non-heroic person has become extremely relevant in today’s literature. In dramaturgy, the plays of Evgeny Grishkovets are classified as neosentimentalism, in poetry - by Timur Kibirov, in prose - most works of women's prose. It is significant that the 2001 Booker Prize winner was Lyudmila Ulitskaya with her neo-sentimentalist novel “The Kukotsky Incident.” The novel is imbued with childish freshness of feelings. L. Ulitskaya comments on the title and concept of her novel: “An incident is an accident. I talked about Kukotsky’s case - about the man and his fate. This incident seems to me to be an incident for each of us. Any person is a specific case in the hand of the Lord God, in the global compote in which we all swim... In this case, it is Kukotsky. But it can be an incident for everyone who carefully observes life and looks at the world fearlessly and honestly...” Something similar can be said about the heroes of the story “Girls” and the novel “Tsyu-yurikh”. And yet, the neosentimentalism of recent years is not equal to Karamzin’s sentimentalism: the sensitivity of modern times has, as it were, passed the phase of irony, doubt and reflection, postmodern polyquotation, the phase of self-denial. A “new sincerity”, a “new sensitivity” appears, where total irony is defeated by “counter-irony”. For example, Andrei Dmitriev’s story “The Way Back,” which earned a “big” Apollo Grigoriev award in 2002, is the story of how the nanny of a boy who has now become a writer went to the store, but instead found herself and a merry company far from Pskov - in the Pushkin Mountains, where the next birthday of the first poet was officially and drunkenly celebrated. The “cathedral” jubilation and libation (everyone loves Pushkin, and at the same time, each other) is replaced by penniless, hangover-like loneliness: the drinking buddies have disappeared, and the heroine has to walk many kilometers “the way back.” The story is inlaid with inconspicuous Pushkin quotes; Maria, illiterate, but who bought a collection of poems with her last pennies, is seen as a sick double of the legendary Arina Rodionovna, her drinking spree and hangover, melancholy and humility, a penchant for fantasy and earthiness, unrestrainedness, roguishness and clumsy affection for the “lordly children” all at once devastatingly real and mythical. Without knowing it, the dissolute passion-bearer secretly educates the narrator. He learned to read from that same penny book, which contained the most important poems, and Mary’s desperate journey became part of the soul, which is destined to comprehend what a “cruel age”, “vague hangover”, “striped miles”, “fatal passions” are, “secret freedom”, “good feelings” Russia, which you cannot exchange for anything.
A special type of modern literature that cannot be ignored due to its increasing importance is This popular literature. Mass and non-mass literature can be divided according to various criteria: in this case, the following characteristic seems productive: following a stable genre canon. Mass literature consists of stable genre schemes, such as detective stories, romance novels, etc. The more fully the author follows the genre canon, the more “reliable” is his readership success. Non-mass literature is based on the opposite strategy - unpredictability; here new genres are invented and literary experiments are carried out. As already mentioned, one of the signs of our time has become the blurring of the boundaries between mass and intellectual literature.
The most striking phenomenon in this area wasdetective series by Boris Akunin. In the last 2 years, this has been the end of the “provincial” series - the novel “Pelagia and the Black Monk”, the continuation of the “Fandorin” and “post-Fandorin” series - “Altyn-Tolobas”, the diptych “Lover of Death”, “Extracurricular Reading”. When the name of Erast Fandorin became known to a large circle of readers, and the total circulation of books about him by the end of 2000 reached a million copies, G. Chkhartishvili explained the principle of creating and popularizing texts as the implementation of a project: “... the roots of literature are in the heart, and the roots of a literary project are in my head. I came up with a multi-part, intricate design. That’s why it’s a project.” Thoughtfulness, consideration of the cultural situation and market conditions are characteristic of the entire history of Fandorin. On the other hand, “The Adventures of Erast Fandorin” is intended primarily for a person who has an understanding of the main books of Russian literature in the amount of average erudition of a university graduate, not necessarily a humanities graduate (N. Leskov, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy). Akunin focuses on the “literary-centrism” of Russian culture. The reader is flattered by the recognition of both a parodic reinterpretation of well-known plots (“Anna Karenina” in “Jack of Spades”), as well as their quoting and stylization. He does not feel like a stranger in the past: he is immersed in the language of the literature of those years, reproduced by the average classic vocabulary, he sees characters and situations that are reminiscent of what he once read. As the critic notes, “Russian classics have acquired a pleasant presentation and now affect the mind and emotions not in an exciting, but in a calming way.” B. Akunin’s plan includes not only the creation of all possible variants of the detective genre, as reported on the cover of each book, but also a consistent projection of the main plot of each of the novels onto the key texts of Russian literature, arranged in historical order - from Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” to the first in time of action of “Azazel” before Gilyarovsky’s “Slum People” in “Death Lover”. The novel “Extracurricular Reading” is constructed as a postmodern text, with its philosophy of a single and endless text of culture: the title of each chapter is simultaneously the title of one of the works of world literature.
The success of the series of books about Fandorin attracted the attention of readers to the books of the professional historian Leonid Yuzefovich, who has been writing about the 80-90s of the 19th century for more than two decades. The works of L. Yuzefovich about the legendary detective Ivan Dmitrievich Putilin (some of the latest are “Harlequin Costume”, “Prince of the Wind”), due to the hero’s occupation, have a detective basis, but are not actually detective stories: these are traditional realistic prose, novels of characters that have long had a stable a circle of adherents who equally value the professionalism of the historian and the talent of the writer, an expert on the past alien to the conjuncture, possessing a leisurely intonation and excellent language. After being awarded the National Bestseller Prize in 2001 for the novel “Prince of the Wind”, this book and what Yuzefovich wrote about Putilin before him began to be published like the series “The Adventures of Ivan Putilin”, with a single stylish design.
Evgeny Lukin and Vyacheslav Rybakov, having created another literary hoax, came up with an author with a mysterious biography and name - Holm van Zaichik. The genre in which “The History of the Greedy Barbarian,” “The Case of the Independent Dervishes,” “The Case of Igor’s Campaign,” and “The Case of the Victorious Monkey” were written can be defined as a “utopian detective story.” Some critics speak of van Zaitchik's post-postmodernism, that is, of a domestic, cozy, non-revolutionary use of postmodern strategies. Indeed, in Van Zaychik’s novels the great state of the future appears - Ordus (Horde plus Rus'), where detective stories unfold. Irony and sentimentality, detective intrigue and witty allusions to modern St. Petersburg realities - all this speaks of a talented combination of an inherently mass genre and its intellectual content.
In addition to the “intelligentsia” historical and utopian detective stories, the ironic detective story is incredibly widespread. Daria Dontsova’s books (the latest include “Bouquet of Beautiful Ladies”, “45-Caliber Smile”, “Fig Leaf Haute Couture”, “Walking under the Fly.” “Miracles in a Saucepan”) go back to the novels of Ioanna Khmelevskaya, the success of which Russia, obviously, became the reason for the emergence of Russian ironic detective stories. Dontsova's novels, unlike her Polish counterpart, do not go beyond the boundaries of mass literature and do not create a new synthesis of intellectuality and mass character. The heroine of Dontsova, a middle-aged lady, pretty, wealthy and educated, unlike Mrs. Joanna, ironizes at everything and everyone, does not have the ability for self-irony, which leads to an abundance of banalities and tactlessness and a high degree of predictability of her investigations.
If we rank detective stories on a scale of irony - seriousness (“hard” detective), then first will be Andrei Kivinov’s stories “Set to Die”, “Homicide” Department”, then Alexandra Marinina’s “Unlocked Door”, “Phantom of Memory”, followed by the stories Tatyana Polyakova’s “The Young Lady and the Hooligan”, “Ghostbusters”, “Fitness for Little Red Riding Hood”, and Alexander Bushkov’s “Vulture”, “Bulldog Fight”, “Piranha: The First Throw” closes the scale. "Indecent dance"
Apparently, mass literature is needed no less than intellectual literature - it has its own functions, its own tasks. At the non/fiction book fair of intellectual literature in Moscow in November of this year, the majority of visitors spoke out against dividing literature into intellectual and mass literature, which should not be forgotten when talking about the modern literary process. at the same time, looking at the abundance of colorful covers, it is necessary to remember that modern literature does not live in mere pockets for reading on the subway. Yuri Davydov, Chairman of the Booker Jury 2001, admitted that he was faced with a very difficult choice and it was extremely difficult for him to name just one work as the best. “I had to read a lot of works, but strangely enough, I didn’t have a funeral mood. I was afraid that having become closely acquainted with modern literature, I would discover its complete and final decline. Fortunately, this did not happen. Young authors write, and they write wonderfully.” And the writer Vladimir Makanin, chairman of the Booker jury 2002, assessing the results, said briefly: “I am pleased with the high quality of the prose.” So there really is no reason for pessimism.
Russian literature of the first decade of the 21st century represents a huge field of discussion. A feature of modern culture is its multidimensionality, the simultaneous existence of different subcultures. Elite and mass literature, the literature of “thick magazines” and network literature (Internet literature) coexist side by side.
In modern Russian literature, the genre has turned from a canonical phenomenon into a marginal one. In the works of writers of the 21st century, it is almost impossible to find a pure genre form of a novel, story, story.
They necessarily exist with some kind of “addition”, which often turns what is called, for example, a novel, into something difficult to define from the point of view of genre. Modern genre modifications are determined not so much by factors of literary reality (genre evolution, synthesis, immanent laws of literary development), but by extra-literary factors: the sociocultural situation, mass needs, the author’s desire for originality. In literature, what occurs is not a natural genre synthesis, but synesthesia, that is, going beyond the genre boundaries of a work with the acquisition of possibilities of related types of art or even different arts that are not inherent in its genre nature. There are known forms of the philological novel (memoirs of a literary critic, imbued with literary criticism - A. Genis “Dovlatov and the Surroundings”, V. Novikov “A Novel with Language”, A. Chudakov “A Darkness Falls on the Old Steps”, etc.), computer thorny (virtual reality and human behavior according to the laws of computer games - V. Pelevin “Helmet of Horror”, V. Burtsev “Diamond Nerves”, S. Lukyanenko “Labyrinth of Reflections” and “False Mirrors”, A. Tyurin and A. Shchegolev “Network”), film novel (translation of film and television plots into the language of fiction - A. Slapovsky “Plot”, A. Belov “Brigade”), vintage novel (remake of pure forms that were popular in a certain time - B. Akunin with a project of spy, fantasy, children's exemplary novels), a cartoon novel, an essay novel, etc. Material from the site
Elite literature focuses on artistic uniqueness, authorial experimentation, and turns to a philosophical understanding of the world, to the search for a new hero and new worldview foundations. Writers model new genre forms, modify existing genres of novels and stories. As a result of transformations, synthetic genres appear: Writers, clarifying the specifics of the created form, give genre definitions to their works in the subtitle: A. Kabakov “House of Models. A Tale of a Boring Time”, N. Rubanova “People above, people below. Text that falls into puzzles”, A. Korolev “Being Bosch. A novel with a biography”, I. Lisnyanskaya “Hva-stunya. Mono-novel”, S. Borovikov “Hook. An unwritten philological novel”, G. Ball “Scream”, prigcha-cry, V. Berezin “Liquid Time. The Tale of Clepsydra”, etc. Some genre formations arise from the synthesis of elements not only of different genres, but also of different types of art. Signs of musical forms can be seen in L. Girshovich’s opera-novel “Viy, Schubert’s vocal cycle to the words of Gogol”, E. Schwartz’s “Concert for Reviews”, in the novel-story by Zh. Snezhkina “Lyublino”.
“Review of Russian and modern literature”
The chronological framework of the modern literary process in Russia is the last fifteen years of the outgoing century, including heterogeneous phenomena and facts of modern literature, heated theoretical discussions, critical discord, literary awards of varying significance, the activities of thick magazines and new publishing houses that are actively publishing works of modern writers.
Modern literature is closely connected, despite its fundamental and undoubted novelty, with the literary life and sociocultural situation of the decades preceding it, the so-called period of “modern literature.” This is a fairly large stage in the existence and development of our literature - from the mid-50s to the mid-80s.
The mid-50s is a new starting point for our literature. The famous report by N.S. Khrushchev at a “closed” meeting of the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, marked the beginning of the liberation of the consciousness of millions of people from the hypnosis of Stalin’s personality cult. The era was called the “Khrushchev Thaw,” which gave birth to the generation of the “sixties,” its contradictory ideology and dramatic fate. Unfortunately, neither the authorities nor the “sixties” came close to a genuine rethinking of Soviet history, political terror, the role of the generation of the 20s, and the essence of Stalinism. The failures of the “Khrushchev Thaw” as an era of change are largely due to this. But in literature there were processes of renewal, reassessment of values and creative searches.
Even before the well-known decisions of the party congress of 1956, a breakthrough to new content took place in Soviet literature through the barriers of the “conflict-free theory” of the 40s, through the rigid guidelines of the theory and practice of socialist realism, through the inertia of reader perception. And not only in the literature that was written “on the table”. V. Ovechkin’s modest essays “District Everyday Life” showed the reader the true situation of the post-war village, its social and moral problems. “Lyrical prose” by V. Soloukhin and E. Dorosh took the reader away from the main paths of the builders of socialism into the real world of Russian “country roads”, in which there is no external heroism, pathos, but there is poetry, folk wisdom, great work, love for the native land.
These works, by the very life material underlying them, destroyed the mythologies of socialist realism literature about the ideal Soviet life, about a heroic man going “ever forward and higher” under the inspiring, inspiring and guiding leadership of the party.
The coming “Khrushchev thaw” seemed to open the floodgates. Restrained for a long time, a qualitatively different literature poured out. Books of poems by wonderful poets came to the reader: L. Martynov (“Birthright”), N. Aseev (“Lad”), V. Lugovsky (“Mid-Century”). And by the mid-60s, even poetry books by M. Tsvetaeva, B. Pasternak, A. Akhmatova would be published.
In 1956, an unprecedented celebration of poetry took place and the almanac “Poetry Day” was published. Both poetic holidays - meetings of poets with their readers, and the Poetry Day almanacs will become annual. “Young prose” boldly and brightly declared itself (V. Aksenov, A. Bitov, A. Gladilin. Poets E. Yevtushenko, A. Voznesensky, R. Rozhdestvensky, B. Akhmadulina and others became idols of youth. “Variety poetry” collected audiences of thousands for poetry evenings at the Luzhniki Stadium.
B. Okudzhava’s original song introduced into the dialogue between the poet and the listener an intonation of trust and participation, unusual for a Soviet person. Human, and not ideologically stilted problems and conflicts in the plays of A. Arbuzov, V. Rozov, A. Volodin transformed the Soviet theater and its audience. The policy of “thick” magazines changed, and in the early sixties, “New World” by A. Tvardovsky published the stories “Matrenin’s Dvor”, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “An Incident at Krechetovka Station” by A.I., who returned from the camps and exile. . Solzhenitsyn.
Undoubtedly, these phenomena changed the nature of the literary process and significantly broke with the tradition of socialist realism, essentially the only officially recognized method of Soviet literature since the early 30s.
Reader tastes, interests, and preferences were also transformed under the influence of the rather active publication of works of world literature of the 20th century in the 60s, primarily by French writers - existentialists Sartre, Camus, the innovative dramaturgy of Beckett, Ionesco, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, the tragic prose of Kafka, etc. The Iron Curtain gradually moved apart.
But changes in Soviet culture, as in life, were not so unequivocally encouraging. The real literary life of almost the same years was marked by the cruel persecution of B.L. Pasternak for the publication in the West of his novel Doctor Zhivago in 1958. The struggle between the magazines “October” and “New World” (Vs. Kochetov and A. Tvardovsky) was merciless. “Secretary literature” did not give up its positions, but healthy literary forces nevertheless did their creative work. Genuinely artistic, rather than opportunistically constructed, texts began to penetrate into the so-called official literature.
In the late fifties, young front-line prose writers turned to the recent past: they explored the dramatic and tragic situations of the war through the point of view of a simple soldier, a young officer. Often these situations were cruel, forcing a person to choose between heroism and betrayal, life and death. Critics of that time greeted the first works of V. Bykov, Yu. Bondarev, G. Baklanov, V. Astafiev with caution and disapproval, accusing the “literature of lieutenants” of “deheroizing” the Soviet soldier, of “trench truth” and the inability or unwillingness to show the panorama of events. In this prose, the center of value shifted from the event to the person, the moral and philosophical issues replaced the heroic and romantic ones, a new hero appeared who endured the harsh everyday life of war on his shoulders. “The strength and freshness of the new books was that, without rejecting the best traditions of military prose, they showed in all the magnifying detail the soldier’s “facial expression” and the “patch” facing death, bridgeheads, nameless high-rises, containing a generalization of the entire trench severity of the war . Often these books carried a charge of cruel drama; they could often be defined as “optimistic tragedies”; their main characters were soldiers and officers of one platoon, company, battery, regiment.” These new realities of literature were also signs, typological features of the changing nature of the literary process, beginning to overcome the socialist realist one-dimensionality of literature.
Attention to a person, his essence, and not his social role, became the defining property of the literature of the 60s. The so-called “village prose” has become a true phenomenon of our culture. She raised a range of issues that still arouse keen interest and controversy to this day. As you can see, truly vital issues were touched upon.
The term "hillbilly prose" was coined by critics. A.I. Solzhenitsyn in his “Speech when presenting the Solzhenitsyn Prize to Valentin Rasputin” clarified: “It would be more correct to call them moralists - for the essence of their literary revolution was the revival of traditional morality, and the crushed, dying village was only a natural, visual object.” The term is conditional, because the basis for the association of “village writers” is not at all a thematic principle. Not every work about the village was classified as “village prose.”
Village writers changed their point of view: they showed the inner drama of the existence of a modern village, and discovered in an ordinary villager a personality capable of moral creation. Sharing the main focus of “village prose,” in a commentary to the novel “And the Day Lasts Longer than a Century,” Ch. Aitmatov formulated the task of the literature of his time as follows: “The duty of literature is to think globally, without losing sight of its central interest, which I understand as the study of a separate human individuality. With this attention to the individual, “village prose” revealed a typological relationship with Russian classical literature. Writers return to the traditions of classical Russian realism, almost abandoning the experience of their immediate predecessors - socialist realist writers - and not accepting the aesthetics of modernism. “The Villagers” address the most difficult and pressing problems of human existence and society and believe that the harsh life material of their prose a priori excludes the playful element in its interpretation. The teacher's moral pathos of Russian classics is organically close to “village prose.” The problematics of the prose of Belov and Shukshin, Zalygin and Astafiev, Rasputin, Abramov, Mozhaev and E. Nosov were never abstractly significant, but only concretely human. The life, pain and torment of an ordinary person, most often a peasant (the salt of the Russian soil), who falls under the skating rink of the history of the state or fatal circumstances, has become the material of “village prose”. His dignity, courage, and ability under these conditions to remain faithful to himself and to the foundations of the peasant world turned out to be the main discovery and moral lesson of “village prose.” A. Adamovich wrote in this regard: “The living soul of the people, preserved, carried through centuries and trials - isn’t this what it breathes, isn’t this what the prose, which today is called rustic, tells us about first of all? And if they write and say that prose, both military and rural, are the pinnacle achievements of our modern literature, is it not because here the writers touched the very nerve of people’s life.
The stories and novels of these writers are dramatic - one of the central images in them is the image of their native land - the Arkhangelsk village by F. Abramov, Vologda - by V. Belov, Siberian - by V. Rasputin and V. Astafiev, Altai - by V. Shukshin. It is impossible not to love it and the person on it - the roots, the basis of everything, are in it. The reader feels the writer's love for the people, but there is no idealization of them in these works. F. Abramov wrote: “I stand for the people’s principle in literature, but I am a resolute opponent of a prayerful attitude to everything that my contemporary says... To love the people means to see with complete clarity both their merits and shortcomings, and their greatness and small, and ups and downs. Writing for the people means helping them understand their strengths and weaknesses.”
The novelty of social and moral content does not exhaust the merits of “village prose.” Ontological problematics, deep psychologism, and the beautiful language of this prose marked a qualitatively new stage in the literary process of Soviet literature - its modern period, with all the complex complex of searches at the content and artistic levels.
The lyrical prose of Y. Kazakov, the first stories of A. Bitov, and the “quiet lyrics” of V. Sokolov and N. Rubtsov added new facets to the literary process of the 60s.
However, the compromise of the “thaw” and the half-truths of this era led to the tightening of censorship in the late 60s. The party leadership of literature with renewed vigor began to regulate and determine the content and paradigm of artistry. Everything that did not coincide with the general line was squeezed out of the process. The Movist prose of V. Kataev received blows from official criticism. “New World” was taken away from Tvardovsky. The persecution of A. Solzhenitsyn and the persecution of I. Brodsky began. The sociocultural situation was changing - “stagnation was setting in.”
In Russian literary culture at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries, many interesting, but insufficiently meaningful pages have still been preserved, the study of which could contribute to a deeper understanding of not only the laws of the evolution of verbal art, but also of certain major socio-political and historical and cultural events of Russian of the past. Therefore, it now seems quite important to turn to journals that for a long time, often due to ideological conjuncture, remained outside of close research attention.
Russian literature of the late 19th - early 20th centuries is a special, dynamic period, characterized, among other things, by the formation of new ideals, intense struggle between social groups and parties, coexistence, and the collision of various literary trends, trends and schools, one way or another reflecting complex historical and socio-political realities and phenomena of the era, intensive contacts with foreign art. For example, the philosophical and ideological foundations of Russian symbolism are largely connected with the German cultural and artistic tradition and philosophy (I. Kant, A. Schopenhauer, Fr. Nietzsche). At the same time, France became the true birthplace of symbolism. It was here that the main stylistic features of this large-scale artistic phenomenon took shape, and its first manifestos and program declarations were published. From here, symbolism began its triumphal march through the countries of Western Europe and Russia. Literature not only presented historical events in the works of domestic and foreign authors with different ideological beliefs, but also revealed the reasons that prompted them to create; The reactions of readers and critics to published works, including translated ones, were incorporated into the literary and social consciousness, demonstrating the degree of their impact on the audience.
Along with books, literary collections, critical publications, printed periodicals were very popular both among literary figures and among readers: newspapers (“Moskovskie Vedomosti”, “Citizen”, “Svet”, “Novoye Vremya”, “Birzhevye Vedomosti” ", "Russian Gazette", "Courier", etc.), magazines ("Bulletin of Europe" by M.M. Stasyulevich - 1866-1918; "Russian Gazette" by M.N. Katkov - 1856-1906; "Dragonfly" by I. F. Vasilevsky - 1875-1908; “Russian Wealth” - 1876-1918; “Russian Thought” - 1880-1918, etc.) and the original form of the mono-journal - diaries, created by F.M. Dostoevsky (“Diary of a Writer” by D.V. Averkiev - 1885-1886; A.B. Kruglova - 1907-1914; F.K. Sologub -1914). We emphasize that all literary magazines at that time were private, and only the “Journal of the Ministry of Public Education” (1834-1917), devoted largely to literary issues, was state-owned. Note that the appearance of magazines, starting from the 1840s, was largely determined by the social and political views of the publishers.
The socio-political and economic changes in our country, which began in 1985 and called perestroika, significantly influenced literary development. “Democratization”, “glasnost”, “pluralism”, proclaimed from above as new norms of social and cultural life, led to a reassessment of values in our literature.
Thick magazines began actively publishing works by Soviet writers written in the seventies and earlier, but for ideological reasons not published then. Thus, the novels “Children of Arbat” by A. Rybakov, “New Assignment” by A. Beck, “White Clothes” by V. Dudintsev, “Life and Fate” by V. Grossman and others were published. The camp theme, the theme of Stalinist repressions becomes almost the main one . The stories of V. Shalamov and the prose of Yu. Dombrovsky are widely published in periodicals. “New World” was published by A. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
In 1988, again, “New World”, thirty years after its creation, published B. Pasternak’s disgraced novel “Doctor Zhivago” with a foreword by D.S. Likhacheva. All these works were classified as so-called “detained literature.” The attention of critics and readers was focused exclusively on them. Magazine circulation reached unprecedented levels, approaching the million mark. “New World”, “Znamya”, “October” competed in publishing activity.
Another stream of the literary process in the second half of the eighties consisted of the works of Russian writers of the 20s and 30s. For the first time in Russia, it was at this time that “big things” by A. Platonov were published - the novel “Chevengur”, the stories “The Pit”, “The Juvenile Sea”, and other works of the writer. Oberiuts are published, E.I. Zamyatin and other writers of the 20th century. At the same time, our magazines reprinted such works of the 60s and 70s as “Pushkin House” by A. Bitov, cherished in samizdat and published in the West, and “Moscow - Petushki” by Ven. Erofeeva, “Burn” by V. Aksenov and others.
The literature of the Russian abroad was equally powerfully represented in the modern literary process: the works of V. Nabokov, I. Shmelev, B. Zaitsev, A. Remizov, M. Aldanov, A. Averchenko, Vl. Khodasevich and many other Russian writers returned to their homeland. “Returned literature” and the literature of the Metropolis are finally merging into one channel of Russian literature of the 20th century. Naturally, both the reader, criticism, and literary criticism find themselves in a very difficult situation, because a new, complete, without blank spots, map of Russian literature dictates a new hierarchy of values, makes it necessary to develop new evaluation criteria, and proposes the creation of a new history of Russian literature of the 20th century without cuts and seizures. Under the powerful onslaught of first-class works of the past, widely available to the domestic reader for the first time, modern literature seems to freeze, trying to understand itself in new conditions. The nature of the modern literary process is determined by “detained” and “returned” literature. Without representing the modern cross-section of literature, it is precisely this literature that influences the reader to the greatest extent, determining his tastes and preferences. It is she who finds herself at the center of critical discussions. Criticism, also freed from the shackles of ideology, demonstrates a wide range of judgments and assessments.
For the first time we are witnessing such a phenomenon when the concepts of “modern literary process” and “modern literature” do not coincide. In the five years from 1986 to 1990, the modern literary process consists of works of the past, ancient and not so distant. Actually, modern literature is pushed to the periphery of the process.
One cannot but agree with the general judgment of A. Nemzer: “The literary policy of perestroika had a pronounced compensatory character. It was necessary to make up for lost time - to catch up, to return, to eliminate gaps, to integrate into the global context.” We really tried to compensate for lost time, to pay off old debts. As we see this time from today, the publishing boom of the perestroika years, despite the undoubted significance of newly discovered works, involuntarily distracted public consciousness from the dramatic modernity.
The actual liberation of culture from state ideological control and pressure in the second half of the 80s was legislatively formalized on August 1, 1990 by the abolition of censorship. Naturally, the history of “samizdat” and “tamizdat” came to an end. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, serious changes took place in the Union of Soviet Writers. It split into several writers' organizations, the struggle between which sometimes becomes serious. But various writing organizations and their “ideological and aesthetic platforms,” perhaps for the first time in Soviet and post-Soviet history, have virtually no influence on the living literary process. It develops under the influence not of directives, but of other factors that are more organic to literature as an art form. In particular, the rediscovery, one might say, of the culture of the Silver Age and its new understanding in literary criticism was one of the significant factors determining the literary process from the beginning of the 90s.
The work of N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, M. Voloshin, Vyach was rediscovered in full. Ivanova, Vl. Khodasevich and many other major representatives of the culture of Russian modernism. The publishers of the large series “The New Library of the Poet” made their contribution to this fruitful process, releasing beautifully prepared collections of the poetic work of writers of the “Silver Age”. The Ellis Lack publishing house not only publishes multi-volume collections of works by classics of the Silver Age (Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova), but also publishes writers of the second rank, for example, G. Chulkov’s excellent volume “Years of Wanderings,” which represents different creative facets of the writer, and some of his works are generally published first. The same can be said about the activities of the Agraf publishing house, which published a collection of works by L. Zinovieva-Annibal. Today we can talk about M. Kuzmin almost entirely published by various publishing houses. The Respublika publishing house has carried out a wonderful literary project - a multi-volume publication by A. Bely. These examples can be continued.
Fundamental monographic studies by N. Bogomolov, L. Kolobaeva and other scientists help to imagine the mosaic and complexity of the literature of the Silver Age. Due to ideological prohibitions, we could not master this culture “over time,” which would undoubtedly be fruitful. It literally “fell” on the general reader out of the blue, often provoking an apologetic, enthusiastic reaction. Meanwhile, this most complex phenomenon deserves close and attentive gradual reading and study. But it happened the way it happened. Modern culture and the reader find themselves under the most powerful pressure of a culture that was rejected during the Soviet period as not only ideologically, but also aesthetically alien. Now the experience of modernism of the beginning of the century and avant-gardeism of the 20s has to be absorbed and rethought in the shortest possible time. We can state not only the fact of the existence of works of the early 20th century as full participants in the modern literary process, but also affirm the fact of overlap, influence of different movements and schools, their simultaneous presence as a qualitative characteristic of the literary process of modern times.
If we take into account the colossal boom in memoir literature, we are faced with another feature of this process. The influence of memoirs on fiction itself is obvious to many researchers. Thus, one of the participants in the discussion “Memoirs at the Turn of Eras,” I. Shaitanov, rightly emphasizes the high artistic quality of memoir literature: “As it approaches the sphere of fiction, the memoir genre begins to lose its documentary nature, giving a lesson in the responsibility of literature in relation to the word...” Despite the researcher’s accurate observation about a certain departure from documentation in many of the published memoirs, memoirs for readers are a means of recreating the social and spiritual history of society, a means of overcoming the “blank spots” of culture, and simply good literature.
Perestroika gave impetus to the intensification of publishing activity. In the early 90s, new publishing houses and new literary magazines of various directions appeared - from the progressive literary journal New Literary Review to the feminist magazine Preobrazhenie. Bookstores-salons “Summer Garden”, “Eidos”, “19 October” and others were born of a new state of culture and, in turn, have a certain influence on the literary process, reflecting and popularizing in their activities one or another trend of modern literature.
In the 90s, for the first time since the revolution, the works of many Russian religious philosophers of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, Slavophiles and Westerners were republished: from V. Solovyov to P. Florensky, A. Khomyakov and P. Chaadaev. The Respublika publishing house is completing the publication of the multi-volume collected works of Vasily Rozanov. These realities of book publishing undoubtedly significantly influence modern literary development, enriching the literary process. By the mid-90s, the literary heritage previously unclaimed by the Soviet country had almost completely returned to the national cultural space. And modern literature itself has noticeably strengthened its position. Thick magazines again provided their pages to contemporary writers. The modern literary process in Russia, as it should be, is again determined exclusively by modern literature. According to stylistic, genre, and linguistic parameters, it is not reducible to a certain cause-and-effect pattern, which, however, does not at all exclude the presence of patterns and connections within the literary process of a more complex order. It is difficult to agree with researchers who do not see any signs of a process in modern literature. Moreover, this position often turns out to be unusually contradictory. For example, G.L. Nefagina states: “The state of literature of the 90s can be compared with the Brownian movement,” and then continues: “a single general cultural system is being formed.” As we can see, the researcher does not deny the existence of the system. Since there is a system, there are also patterns. What kind of “Brownian motion” is this! This point of view is a tribute to a fashionable trend, the idea of modern literature after the collapse of the ideological hierarchy of values as postmodern chaos. The life of literature, especially literature with such traditions as Russian, despite the times it has experienced, it seems, not only continues fruitfully, but also lends itself to analytical systematization.
Criticism has already done a lot by analyzing the main trends of modern literature. The magazines “Questions of Literature”, “Znamya”, “New World” hold round tables and discussions of leading critics on the state of modern literature. In recent years, several respectable monographs on postmodernism in Russian literature have been published.
The problems of modern literary development, as we see it, lie in the mainstream of the development and refraction of various traditions of world culture in the conditions of the crisis state of the world (ecological and man-made disasters, natural disasters, terrible epidemics, rampant terrorism, the flourishing of mass culture, a crisis of morality, the onset of virtual reality and etc.), which all of humanity experiences together with us. Psychologically, it is aggravated by the general situation at the turn of centuries and even millennia. And in the situation of our country - awareness and elimination of all the contradictions and collisions of the Soviet period of national history and culture of socialist realism.
The atheistic education of generations of Soviet people, the situation of spiritual substitution, when for millions of people religion and faith were replaced by the mythologems of socialism, have dire consequences for modern man. To what extent does literature respond to these most difficult life and spiritual realities? Should it, as it was in classical Russian literature, give answers to difficult questions of existence, or at least pose them to the reader, contribute to the “softening of morals”, cordiality in people’s relationships? Or is the writer an impartial and cold observer of human vices and weaknesses? Or maybe the destiny of literature is to escape into a world of fantasy and adventure far from reality?.. And the field of literature is an aesthetic or intellectual game, and literature has nothing to do with real life, with man in general? Does a person need art? A Word alienated from God, separated from divine truth? These questions are very real and require answers.
In our criticism there are different points of view on the modern literary process and the very purpose of literature. Thus, A. Nemzer is confident that literature has stood the test of freedom and the last decade has been “wonderful.” The critic identified thirty names of Russian prose writers with whom he associates the fruitful future of our literature. Tatyana Kasatkina in her article “Literature after the End of Times” argues that there is no single literature now, but there are “shreds and fragments.” She proposes to divide the “texts” of current literature into three groups: “Works, the reading of which is an event in a person’s real life, which does not take him away from this life, but participates in it... works from which one does not want to return to real life, and this their fundamental, constitutional (and not at all positive) property... works that you don’t want to return to, even if you realize their value, that are hard to enter a second time, that have all the properties of a zone with the effect of accumulating radiation.” Without sharing the researcher’s general pathos in assessing the current state of Russian literature, we can use its classification. After all, such a division is based on time-tested principles - the nature of the reflection of reality in literature and the author’s position.
The last fifteen years of the 20th century are especially significant in the history of our literature. Russian literature finally turned out to be free from directive ideological pressure. At the same time, the literary process was characterized by increased drama and complexity of an objective nature.
The desire to recreate the history of literature of the last century in its entirety (returning to the reader the works of A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov, B. Pasternak, Oberiuts, writers of the Silver Age, emigrants, etc., which were forcibly not allowed in Soviet times) almost supplanted modern literature in general. Thick magazines experienced a publishing boom. Their circulation was approaching the million mark. It seemed that contemporary writers were relegated to the periphery of the process and were of little interest to anyone. The active reassessment of the culture of the Soviet period in the “new criticism” (“Wake for Soviet Literature”), as categorical as its recent apologetics in official criticism, caused a feeling of confusion among both readers and writers themselves. And when the circulation of thick magazines fell sharply in the early 90s (political and economic reforms entered an active phase in the country), modern literature generally lost its main platform. Intracultural problems became even more complicated under the influence of extraliterary factors.
In criticism, discussions arose around the problem of the modern literary process, voices were heard questioning the very fact of its existence. Some researchers argued that the collapse of a unified and mandatory system of ideological and aesthetic attitudes, and the resulting multidirectionality of literary development, lead to the automatic disappearance of the literary process. And yet the literary process survived, Russian literature stood the test of freedom. Moreover, in recent years there has been an obvious strengthening of the position of modern literature in the literary process. This is especially true for prose. Almost every new issue of such magazines as “New World”, “Znamya”, “October”, “Zvezda” gives us a new interesting work that is read, discussed and discussed.
The literary process of the 20th century is a unique phenomenon that embodies a complex interaction of multidirectional vectors of aesthetic search. The archetypal collision “archaists and innovators” has found its forms of embodiment in the literature of modern times. But at the same time, both writers who gravitate towards classical traditions and experimental pioneers - all, within the parameters of the artistic paradigm they have adopted, are looking for forms that are adequate to changes in the consciousness of modern man, new ideas about the world, about the function of language, about the place and role of literature.
The study of the modern literary process is multifaceted and involves the analysis and systematization of a huge amount of factual material. The framework of the benefit can hardly accommodate it.
The manual focuses on the most characteristic phenomena of modern literature, primarily related to various principles of artistic reflection of life reality. In modern Russian literature, as in the world artistic process, there is a confrontation between realism and postmodernism. The philosophical and aesthetic principles of postmodernism are actively being introduced by its brilliant theorists into the world artistic process, postmodernist ideas and images are in the air. Even in the works of realistically oriented writers, such as Makanin, for example, we see a fairly widespread use of elements of postmodernist poetics. However, in recent years, crisis phenomena have been obvious in the artistic practice of postmodernists themselves. The ideological load in postmodernism is so great that “artistry” itself, as the immanent nature of literature, begins to simply collapse under such influence.
Some researchers of postmodernism are prone to pessimistic forecasts and believe that its history in Russia was “stunningly stormy, but short” (M. Epstein), i.e. reflect on it as a past phenomenon. Of course, there is some simplification in this statement, but the replication of techniques, self-repetition in the latest works of famous postmodernists V. Sorokin, V. Erofeev and others indicate the exhaustion of “style”. And the reader, apparently, begins to get tired of the “courage” in removing linguistic and moral taboos, of the intellectual game, blurring of the boundaries of the text and the programmed multiplicity of its interpretations.
The reader of today, as one of the subjects of the literary process, plays an important role in it. It was his need to know the true realities of history, the disbelief in the “artistically” transformed past in the works of Soviet literature, which lied so much about life and “straightened” it, that provoked a colossal interest in memoirs, its real flourishing in recent literature.
The reader returns literature to the traditional values of realism, expects “cordiality”, responsiveness, and good style from it. It is from this readership that the fame and popularity of Boris Akunin, for example, grows. The writer competently calculated the systemic stability and plot thoroughness of the detective genre (everyone is so tired of the plotlessness and chaos of the artistic world of postmodern works). He diversified genre shades as much as possible (from spy to political detective), invented a mysterious and charming hero - detective Fandorin - and immersed us in the atmosphere of the 19th century, so attractive from a historical distance. And the high-level stylized language of his prose completed the job. Akunin became a cult writer with his own wide circle of admirers.
It is interesting that at the other pole of literature there is also its own cult figure - Viktor Pelevin, a guru for an entire generation. The virtual world of his works is gradually replacing the real world for his admirers, truly they find “the world as a text.” Pelevin, as we noted above, is a talented artist who sees tragic collisions in the fate of humanity. However, the reader's perception of his work reveals the vulnerability and even inferiority of the artistic world he creates. Playing with “imaginaries,” boundless nihilism, and irony without boundaries turn into the imaginary nature of creativity. A writer of extraordinary talent turns into a figure of mass culture. Having created the world expected by admirers, the author becomes its prisoner. It is not the writer who guides the reader, but the audience who determines the space of artistic search that is recognizable to it. It is unlikely that such feedback will be fruitful for the writer, the literary process and, of course, the reader.
The prospects for the literary process in Russia are connected with other creative trends, with the enrichment of the artistic possibilities of realism. Its framework, as we see in the work of many modern writers, can be expanded even to modernist and postmodernist techniques. But at the same time, the writer retains moral responsibility to life. He does not replace the Creator, but only strives to reveal his plan.
And if literature helps a person clarify the time of his existence, then “every new aesthetic reality clarifies for a person his ethical reality” (I. Brodsky). Through familiarization with aesthetic reality, a person “clarifies” his moral guidelines, learns to understand his time and relate his destiny to the highest meaning of existence.
The literary process in Russia at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries inspires confidence that literature is still necessary for man and humanity and is faithful to the great purpose of the Word.
Soviet literature reading poetry
Bibliography
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- 2. Bitov A. Pushkin House.
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- 3. Gromova M.I. Russian modern drama: Textbook. - M., 1999.
- 4. Esin S.B. Principles and techniques of analyzing a literary work: Textbook. - M., 1999.
- 5. Ilyin I.P. Postmodernism from its origins to the end of the century: the evolution of a scientific myth. - M., 1998.
- 6. Kostikov G.K. From structuralism to postmodernism. - M., 1998.
- 7. Lipovetsky M.N. Russian postmodernism. Essays on historical poetics. Ekaterinburg, 1997.
- 8. Nefagina G.L. Russian prose of the second half of the 80s - early 90s of the XX century. - Minsk, 1998.
- 9. Postmodernists on postculture: Interviews with contemporary writers and critics. - M., 1996.
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- 11. Rudnov V.P. Dictionary of 20th century culture: key concepts and texts. - M., 1997.
- 12. Skoropanova I.S. Poetry during the years of glasnost. - Minsk, 1993.
Modern literature is very diverse: it is not only books created today, but also works of “returned literature”, “literature of the desk”, works of writers of different waves of emigration. In other words, these are works written or first published in Russia from the mid-1980s of the 20th century to the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century. Criticism, literary magazines and numerous literary prizes played a significant role in the development of the modern literary process.
If during the period of thaw and stagnation in literature only the method of socialist realism was welcomed, then the modern literary process is characterized by the coexistence of different directions.
One of the most interesting cultural phenomena of the second half of the 20th century is postmodernism - a trend not only in literature, but also in all humanities disciplines. Postmodernism arose in the West in the late 60s and early 70s. It was a search for a synthesis between modernism and mass culture, the destruction of any mythologies. Modernism strived for something new, which initially denied old, classical art. Postmodernism arose not after modernism, but next to it. He does not deny everything old, but tries to ironically rethink it. Postmodernists turn to convention, deliberate literary quality in the works they create, and combine the stylistics of different genres and literary eras. “In the postmodern era,” writes V. Pelevin in the novel “Numbers,” “the main thing is not the consumption of material objects, but the consumption of images, since images are much more capital-intensive.” Neither the author, nor the narrator, nor the hero are responsible for what is said in the work. The formation of Russian postmodernism was greatly influenced by the traditions of the Silver Age (M. Tsvetaeva,
A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, B. Pasternak, etc.), avant-garde culture (V. Mayakovsky, A. Kruchenykh, etc.) and numerous manifestations of the dominant socialist realism. In the development of postmodernism in Russian literature, three periods can be roughly distinguished:
- Late 60s - 70s - (A. Terts, A. Bitov, V. Erofeev, Vs. Ne-krasov, L. Rubinstein, etc.)
- 70s - 80s - self-affirmation of postmodernism through the underground, awareness of the world as a text (E. Popov, Vik. Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, V. Sorokin, etc.)
- The end of the 80s - the 90s - the period of legalization (T. Kibirov, L. Petrushevskaya, D. Galkovsky, V. Pelevin, etc.)
Russian postmodernism is heterogeneous. The following works can be classified as prosaic works of postmodernism: “Pushkin House” by A. Bitov, “Moscow - Petushki” by Ven. Erofeeva, “School for Fools” by Sasha Sokolov, “Kys” by T. Tolstoy, “Parrot”, “Russian Beauty” by V. Erofeev, “The Soul of a Patriot, or Various Messages to Ferfichkin” by Ev. Popova, “Blue Lard”, “Ice”, “Bro’s Path” by V. Sorokin, “Omon Ra”, “Life of Insects”, “Chapaev and Emptiness”, “Generation P” (“Generation P”) by V. Pelevin, “ Endless Dead End" by D. Galkovsky, "Sincere Artist", "Glokaya Kuzdra", "I am Not Me" by A. Slapovsky, "Coronation" by B. Akunin, etc.
In modern Russian poetry, poetic texts are created in line with postmodernism and its various manifestations D. Prigov, T. Kibirov, Vs. Nekrasov, L. Rubinstein and others.
In the era of postmodernism, works appear that can rightfully be classified as realistic. The abolition of censorship and democratic processes in Russian society contributed to the flourishing of realism in literature, sometimes reaching the point of naturalism. These are the works of V. Astafiev “Cursed and Killed”, E. Nosov “Tepa”, “Feed the Birds”, “The Ring Dropped”,
V. Belov “The Immortal Soul”, V. Rasputin “In the Hospital”, “Izba”, F. Iskander “Sandro from Chegem”, B. Ekimov “Pinochet”, A. Kim “Father-Forest”, S. Kaledin “Building Battalion” ”, G. Vladimova “The General and His Army”, O. Ermakova “Mark of the Beast”, A. Prokhanov “Tree in the Center of Kabul”, “Chechen Blues”, “Walkers in the Night”, “Mister Hexogen”, etc. Material from the site
Since the beginning of the 1990s, a new phenomenon has appeared in Russian literature, which has received the definition of post-realism. Realism is based on the universally understood principle of relativity, dialogical comprehension of a continuously changing world and the openness of the author’s position in relation to it. Post-realism, as defined by N. L. Leiderman and M. N. Lipovetsky, is a certain system of artistic thinking, the logic of which began to extend to both the master and the debutant, a literary movement that is gaining strength with its own style and genre preferences. In post-realism, reality is perceived as an objective given, a set of many circumstances that influence human destiny. In the first works of post-realism, a demonstrative departure from social pathos was noted; writers turned to the private life of a person, to his philosophical understanding of the world. Critics usually classify as post-realists plays, short stories, the story “Time is Night” by L. Petrushevskaya, the novels “Underground, or a Hero of Our Time” by V. Makanin, the stories of S. Dovlatov, “Psalm” by F. Gorenshtein, “Dragonfly, Enlarged to the size of a dog" by O. Slavnikova, the collection of short stories "The Prussian Bride" by Y. Buida, the stories "Voskoboev and Elizaveta", "Turn of the River", the novel "The Closed Book" by A. Dmitriev, the novels "Lines of Fate, or Milashevich's Chest" "M. Kharitonov, "The Cage" and "Saboteur" by A. Azolsky, "Medea and Her Children" and "The Case of Kukotsky" by L. Ulitskaya, "Real Estate" and "Khurramabad" by A. Volos.
In addition, in modern Russian literature works are created that are difficult to attribute to one direction or another. Writers realize themselves in different directions and genres. In Russian literary criticism, it is also customary to distinguish several thematic areas in the literary process of the late 20th century.
- Appeal to myth and its transformation (V. Orlov, A. Kim, A. Slapovsky, V. Sorokin, F. Iskander, T. Tolstaya, L. Ulitskaya, Aksenov, etc.)
- The legacy of village prose (E. Nosov, V. Belov, V. Rasputin, B. Ekimov, etc.)
- Military theme (V. Astafiev, G. Vladimov, O. Ermakov, Makanin, A. Prokhanov, etc.)
- Fantasy theme (M. Semenova, S. Lukyanenko, M. Uspensky, Vyach. Rybakov, A. Lazarchuk, E. Gevorkyan, A. Gromov, Yu. Latynina, etc.)
- Modern memoirs (E. Gabrilovich, K. Vanshenkin, A. Rybakov, D. Samoilov, D. Dobyshev, L. Razgon, E. Ginzburg, A. Naiman, V. Kravchenko, S. Gandlevsky, etc.)
- The heyday of the detective (A. Marinina, P. Dashkova, M. Yudenich, B. Akunin, L. Yuzefovich, etc.)
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On this page there is material on the following topics:
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- literary process of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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