Youth to old age 

Presentation "features of literary works of recent decades". Modern Russian Literature: Themes, Problems, Works Literary Resources of the Internet

Theory:

In the 1950s, a number of decrees were issued in the USSR aimed at improving the quality of dramaturgy. The keen interest of the ruling circles in modern drama was due not only to general ideological considerations, but also to another additional reason. The seasonal repertoire of the Soviet theater was supposed to consist of thematic sections (Russian classics, foreign classics, a performance dedicated to an anniversary or holiday date, etc.). At least half of the premieres had to be prepared according to modern dramaturgy. It was desirable that the main performances were staged not on light comedy plays, but on works of serious subjects. Under these conditions, most of the country's theaters, concerned about the problem of the original repertoire, were looking for new plays.

The general rise of theatrical art in the late 1950s led to the rise of dramaturgy. The works of new talented authors appeared, many of which determined the main paths for the development of drama in the coming decades. Approximately during this period, the individualities of three playwrights were formed, whose plays were staged a lot throughout the Soviet period - V. Rozov, A. Volodin, A. Arbuzov.

Among all the variety of genres and styles that have swept the theater from the late 50s of the XX century up to the present day, in modern dramaturgy one can note the clear predominance of the traditional Russian theater socio-psychological plays. Despite the frankly everyday, even everyday background of the action itself, most of these works had a very deep, multi-layered philosophical and ethical subtext.

Here, the writers actively used such techniques as:

· creating an "undercurrent"

· embedded plot,

· expansion of the stage space through the introduction of poetic or subject symbols.

· For example, a small flower garden with daisies in A. Vampilov's play "Last Summer in Chulimsk", like the old cherry orchard from the well-known drama of the same name by A. Chekhov, becomes for Vampilov's heroes a kind of test for the ability to love, humanity, love of life.

· Very effective, enhancing the psycho-emotional impact on the viewer, were such techniques as off-stage "voices", sometimes constituting, in fact, a separate plan of action, or fantastic visions of the characters.

The late 1950s - early 1970s were marked by the bright individuality of A. Vampilov. During his short life he wrote only a few plays: Farewell in June, « Eldest son", « Duck hunting», « Provincial jokes, « Twenty minutes with an angel And " The case with the metropolitan page», « Last summer in Chulimsk» and unfinished vaudeville" Incomparable Tips". Returning to Chekhov's aesthetics, Vampilov set the direction for the development of Russian drama in the next two decades.

Exercise: P Read one of the plays by the proposed authors (A. Volodin, V. Rozov, A. Vampilov) and prepare a brief retelling.

Independent work No. 55-56.

Theory: textbook by V.A. Chalmaev, S.A. Zinin “Literature of the XX CENTURY. Part 2”, pp. 326 – 352.

Exercise: Based on the theoretical material of the textbook, prepare answers to the following questions:

1. What events in the literary life of recent years do you consider the most significant? What books (publications) caught your attention and why? By what criteria do you determine the degree of significance of a work of art in contemporary culture?

2. Based on the materials of the site http:// magazines.russ.ru, prepare short reports about the leading "thick" literary magazines: Novy Mir, Znamya, Zvezda, Oktyabr, Neva. Find information about the time when the magazine was created, restore its brief history, and describe its place in the literary process of recent decades.

3. Explain how you understand the meaning of concepts postmodernism, postrealism, neonaturalism, neosementalism. Describe the main features of each of these currents.

4. What socio-cultural factors have a decisive influence on the development of modern cultural and social life?

5. Prepare a report on modern Russian literary awards (Booker Prize, Anti-Booker Prize, Apollon Grigoriev Prize, Andrei Bely Prize, Ivan Petrovich Belkin Prize), Pay attention to what literary merits are marked by each prize.

Independent work No. 57

W. Shakespeare "Hamlet", O. Balzac "Gobsek", G. Flaubert "Salambo", I.-V. Goethe. "Faust"

Impressionist poets (Ch. Baudelaire, A. Rimbaud, O. Renoir, P. Mallarme and others).

Exercise: prepare a review (in writing) of a work of foreign literature of the 19th century that you yourself read.

Approximate review plan:

1. Brief bibliographic information about the book.

2. The meaning of the title of the work.

3.Personal impressions of the read.

4. Features of the plot and composition.

5. The skill of the writer in depicting the characters of the heroes.

6. Language and style of behavior.

7. The main idea of ​​the work.

8. Relevance of the issue.

Independent work No. 58.

E. Hemingway. "The Old Man and the Sea", E.-M. Remarque. "Three comrades", G. Marquez. "One Hundred Years of Solitude", P. Coelho. "Alchemist".

Task: prepare an electronic presentation on one of the proposed topics:

1. Based on the textbook material and additional literature, prepare an overview of E. Hemingway's work. What are the main themes of his works. Expand the content, main theme and idea of ​​the story "The Old Man and the Sea". What works by the author would you recommend reading?

2. Get acquainted with the work of G. - G. Marquez. Expand the content, main themes and idea of ​​the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. What interested you in the writer's work? What works would you recommend?

3. Get acquainted with the work of P. Coelho. Expand the content, main theme and idea of ​​one of the works of this writer. What interested you in the work of this writer? What books would you recommend reading?

APPENDIX No. 1.

Poem analysis scheme

Determine the topic (About what?)

· Lyrical plot: how does the lyrical hero appear at the beginning, does his state change at the end?

What kind of mood is imbued with? Does it change throughout the poem?

The role of the landscape (if any)

What figurative and expressive means does the poet use? (anaphora, metaphors, epithets, comparisons, litote hyperbolas);

Genre of verse (elegy, message, appeal, ode, landscape lyrics, madrigal, epigram, epitaph)

The composition of the poem (is it possible to divide the verse into semantic parts)

Features of the syntactic structure (which sentences on the purpose of the statement and intonation prevail)

The sound structure of the language (the predominance of sounds)

your attitude towards what you read.

Visual and expressive means

· Anaphora - repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several lines of poetry

· Hyperbola- exaggeration

· Litotes- understatement

· Metaphor- a hidden comparison of an object or phenomenon based on the similarity of features.

· personification- Animation of inanimate objects.

· Oxymoron- a combination of words that are opposite in meaning ( hot snow, living corpse, sweet poison)

· Comparison- comparison of objects according to the principle of their similarity (there is a word How).

· Epithet- figurative definition of an object or phenomenon

Lyric genres:

ü Oh yeah- a solemn lyrical poem glorifying a heroic deed.

ü landscape sketch- a picture of nature.

ü Elegy- a poem riddled with sadness, sad thoughts about life, fate, your dream.

ü Message- addressing another person.

ü Satire- a work that ridicules shortcomings.

ü Epigram- a satirical poem addressed to a certain person.

ü Madrigal – a short poem expressing admiration, a compliment.

ü Epitaph - gravestone inscription in poetic form, dedicated to the deceased.

APPENDIX No. 2.

Theory:

An episode is a part of the text that reveals semantic and compositional unity.

1. Determine the place of this episode in the development of the plot:

At what point in the hero's life do we meet him?

· What do we already know about it and about the author's attitude towards it?

2. Formulate a general impression of what you read, think about what caused it. How does the author create it?

· What is interesting in the events, actions of the hero, in relation to people?

Pay attention to the form of the narration: on whose behalf is it being conducted? What is the advantage of this approach?

Imagine through whose eyes we see the picture?

Think about how the place and time are depicted (in other words, what is the originality of the chronotope)?

Pay attention to the features of word selection, grammatical organization of the text. How do they clarify their understanding of what is happening?

3. Draw a conclusion about the main idea of ​​the episode:

What did you learn about the hero? What questions have arisen?

· What was the future fate of the hero?

4. Compare your understanding of the episode with its interpretation in criticism, in other forms of art.

APPENDIX No. 3.

How to make a summary?

Abstract- these are genres of work with a different source. The purpose of this genre is to fix, rework this or that scientific text.

The synopsis is a verbatim extract from the source text. At the same time, the abstract is not a complete rewriting of someone else's text. Usually, when writing an abstract, the source text is first read, the main provisions are highlighted in it, examples are selected, the material is re-arranged, and only then the text of the abstract is drawn up. The abstract can be complete when the work is done with the entire text of the source or incomplete when one or more issues raised in the source are of interest.

The general sequence of actions in compiling a textual summary can be defined as follows:

1. Understand the goals and objectives of note taking.

2. Get acquainted with the work as a whole: read the preface, introduction, table of contents and highlight informationally significant sections of the text.

4. Make a summary, for this:

Consistently highlight the theses in the text and write them down with subsequent argumentation;

Write a brief summary - summarize the text of the abstract, highlight the main content of the material worked out, and evaluate it.

Abstracts can be planned, they are written on the basis of the drafted plan of the article, book. Each question of the plan corresponds to a certain part of the abstract.

APPENDIX No. 4.

Analysis plan for a dramatic work:

2. Poster (list of actors): in what main have they already been characterized? How does the arrangement of characters help to guess the nature (social, love, philosophical, psychological) of a dramatic work? We pay attention to the choice of names, the sequence of their presentation, the author's remarks.

3. Design remarks of the play: what "tips" to the director, actors they hide in themselves. What features of the temporal and spatial organization of the action explain the guess about the play's conflict?

4. The first appearance of the main characters. How are they revealed in the system of monologues, dialogues, remarks aside? Are we talking about the external or internal (psychological), conscious or unconscious conflict of the hero?

5. The main stages in the development of a dramatic conflict: its culmination and the outcome of the action. How are they related to the author's idea of ​​the play?

6. Individual scenes of the work are known to you. Try to explain one of them.

References

Main literature:

1. Lebedev Yu. V. Literature. Grade 10. Proc. for educational institutions. At 2 o'clock - M .: « Education »

2. Zinin S.A. Sakharov V. And Literature of the 19th century. Grade 10 Reader for educational institutions. At 2 o'clock - M., OOO « TID « Russian word - RS »

3. Belokurova S.P., Sukhikh I.N. Literature. Grade 10 (basic level): workshop: secondary (complete) general education - M .: Publishing Center "Academy" - 176 p.

4. Zinin S.A. Literature of the XX century. Grade 11: Proc. for educational institutions. At 2 o'clock - M.: LLC "TID "Russian Word", 2007.-600s.

Additional literature:

1. Kozhinov V. A prophet in his Fatherland. - M., 2002.

3. Musatov V.V. History of Russian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. - M., 2001.

4. Nabokov V. Lectures on Russian literature. - M., 2001.

5. Russian literature of the twentieth century. / Ed. A.G. Andreeva. - M., 2002.

6. Russian literature of the XIX century. (part 1, 2, 3). 10 cells / Ed. Ionina G.N. - M., 2001.

7. Smirnova L.N. Russian literature of the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries. - M., 2001.

8. Sokolov A.G. History of Russian literature of the 19th–20th centuries. - M., 2000.

9. Timina S.I. Russian prose of the late twentieth century. - M., 2001.

Russian literature of the first decade of the 21st century is a huge discussion field. A feature of modern culture is its multidimensionality, the simultaneity of the existence of different subcultures. Elite and mass literature, the literature of "thick magazines" and the 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 XXI century it is almost impossible to find a pure genre form of a novel, story, short story.

They necessarily exist with some kind of “appendage”, often turning what is named, for example, a novel, into something that is difficult to define from the point of view of the genre. Modern genre modifications are conditioned not so much by the factors of literary reality (genre evolution, synthesis, immanent laws of literary development), as by non-literary moments: the sociocultural situation, mass needs, the author's desire for originality. In literature, there is not a natural genre synthesis, but synesthesia, that is, going beyond the genre limits of a work with the acquisition of the possibilities of related art forms 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, permeated with literary criticism - A. Genis "Dovlatov and environs", V. Novikov "A novel with language", A. Chudakov "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 stories into the language of fiction - A. Slapovsky "Plot", A. Belov "Brigada"), vintage novel (a 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, a novel essay, etc. material from the site

Elite literature focuses on artistic uniqueness, the author's experiment, turns to the philosophical understanding of the world, to the search for a new hero and new worldview foundations. Writers model new genre forms, modify the established genres of the novel and short story. 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. The Tale of a Boring Time”, N. Rubanova “People from above, people from below. Text breaking up into puzzles”, A. Korolev “Being Bosch. A novel with a biography”, I. Lisnyanskaya “Hva-stunya. Mononoman”, S. Borovikov “Hook. An unwritten philological novel”, G. Ball “Scream” prigcha-lamentation, V. Berezin “Liquid time. The Tale of Clepsydra, etc. Some genre formations arise from the synthesis of elements not only from different genres, but also from different types of art. Signs of musical forms can be seen in L. Girshovich's novel-opera "Viy, Schubert's vocal cycle to the words of Gogol", E. Schwartz "Concert for Reviews", in the novel-romance by Zh. Snezhkina "Lublino".

Modern 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 literature 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 popular literature in the early 1990s. Genres of popular literature:

Detective. 1990s: Alexandra Marinina. 2000s: Daria Dontsova and Boris
Akunin.

- action movie (action): Alexander Bushkov, Victor Dotsenko.

- "pink romance";

Thriller.

- fantastic. Sergey Lukyanenko. The dependence of popular literature on television series.

Growing interest in memoirs and other forms of non-fiction.

New trends in popular literature since 2005:

- glamorous literature. Oksana Robsky.

- "anti-glamor" literature. Sergey Minaev.

- investigative novels. Yulia Latynina.

- Imitations of super bestsellers.

3. "Post-Soviet" Literature.

The disappearance of "socialist realism" in the early 1990s. Growing nostalgia for the USSR in the early 2000s. Rehabilitation of socialist realism. Alexander Prokhanov. The novel "Mr. Hexogen".

The phenomenon of "thick" literary magazines. Literature of a realistic orientation. Traditions of the "liberal" Soviet literature of the "sixties".

Writers of "middle age":

Dmitry Bykov. The novels "Justification", "Spelling", "Evacuator", "J.-D."

Andrey Gelasimov. The novel "The Year of Deception", the story "Thirst".

Olga Slavnikova. Novel "2017".

Alexey Slapovsky. The novels "Quality of Life", "They".

Ludmila Ulitskaya. The novel "Daniel Stein, translator".

"New Realism".

Zakhar Prilepin. The novels "Pathologies", "Sankya", "Sin".

4. Between realism and postmodernism

Older generation:

Tatyana Tolstaya. Roman "Kis".

Ludmila Petrushevskaya. The novel "Number One or In the Gardens of Other Possibilities". Vasily Aksenov. The novels "Voltairians and Voltairians", "Moscow-kva-kva", "Rare Earths".

Middle generation:

Mikhail Shishkin. The novels "The Capture of Ishmael", "Venus Hair".

Aleksey Ivanov. The novels "The Heart of Parma", "The Gold of Revolt".

5. Russian postmodernism.

The origins are in the underground of the 1970s and 1980s. Sotsart. Moscow Conceptualism.

Dmitry Prigov.

Lev Rubinstein.

Vladimir Sorokin. Rising prominence in the late 1990s. The novels "Blue Fat", "Ice Trilogy", "The Day of the Oprichnik". Films "Moscow," Kopeyka ". Opera "Children of Rosenthal".

"Junior" conceptualists:

Pavel Pepperstein, Oleg Anofriev "The Mythogenic Love of Castes".

"Petersburg fundamentalists".

Imperial theme.

Pavel Krusanov. The novels "Angel Bite", "Bom-Bom", "American Hole".

Ironic line: Sergey Nosov. The novels "Hungry Time", "The Rooks Have Flew".

Viktor Pelevin. Satire and Buddhism. The novels "Chapaev and the Void", "Generation P", "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf", "EmpireV". Alexey Ivanov. Modern "fantasy" with historical. novels "The Heart of Parma", "The Gold of Revolt" (about the Pugachev uprising). Mikhail Shishkin (lives in Switzerland) "The Capture of Ishmael 2000." Russian Booker Prize. "Venus hair" (about the psychology of a Russian person.)

Sergei Bolmat. The novels "Themselves", "In the air". Mikhail Elizarov. The story "Nails", the novels "Pasternak", "The Librarian". Alexander Garros and Alexey Evdokimov. The novels "Puzzle", "Grey Slime", "The Truck Factor".

Main directions

in modern Russian literature

It is now less and less common to hear voices shouting: "We have no literature."

The concept of " Modern literature”For many, 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 awards, large and small, well-known, such as the Booker Prize, and just born, for example, the name of Pushkin's Ivan Petrovich Belkin, awards that help talented writers survive and thoughtful readers orient themselves.
  • Secondly, the incredible activity of book publishing. Now not only “thick” magazines are rushing for literary novelties, but also the book publishing houses Vagrius, Zakharov, Podkova, etc. Often the book manages to come out earlier than the last part of the same novel - in the magazine, which forms a healthy competition.
  • Thirdly, literary fairs. Annual fairs of non/fiction intellectual literature in Moscow, book fairs of modern literature in the Ice Palace in St. Petersburg become a real event; meetings with writers, round tables and discussions encourage authors to write and readers to read.
  • Fourth, the literary Internet. Despite the fact that “seterature” differs in many respects from traditional “paper” literature, they are still close relatives, and a growing number of electronic libraries and literary sites, where each visitor is a reader, a writer, and a critic, where there are no “high instances” and authorities, but there is only love for the word and text, testifies to the advent of a new literary generation.

What are the main trends and general patterns of Russian literature in 2001-2002?

For the last two years, literature in Russia has continued to develop according to the same laws as it has been throughout the last decade, its main directions are:

  • 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 "tacit" influence on all modern literature, but the balance of power is changing. Just as it was once necessary to defend realism from postmodernism (in 1995, Booker was awarded to Georgy Vladimov with his realistic novel The General and His Army as a warning 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 In 2002, under the leadership of Vladimir Makanin, they declared: "The inclusion of 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 it unacceptable to create such a precedent").

2. Strengthens tendencies to blur borders

  • between realistic and non-realistic trends in literature (a feature of most modern texts, most clearly in the work 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, and others, “detective & utopia & parody” by Holm Van Zaichik, etc.);

  • between literature and non-literary reality. (The extremist movement “Walking Together” and their actions of public destruction of the books of Vladimir Sorokin and Bayan Shiryanov are, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the blurring of boundaries between literature and reality outside of it, 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 works of art - all this is the 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 develop actively.

Founders of Russian postmodernism are poets Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Timur Kibirov, Ivan Zhdanov, Alexander Eremenko etc., prose writers Venedikt Erofeev, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Erofeev.

It should be noted that Russian postmodernism, whether it is the 70s or the 2000s, is characterized by the divisionpostmodern artistic strategies into 2 varieties:

  • The first is “postmodernism as a complex of worldview 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: “citation”, language games, unusual construction of the text, as in the novel by Tatyana Tolstaya "Kys" (2001). Hundreds of volumes have been written about postmodernism and more than 600 of its 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 of 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 perceive only a text (a description of the world), and his consciousness is also the sum of texts. Any work (and any consciousness) is a part of this endless text. Hence the idea of ​​polyquotation as a norm (there is no point in dividing into one's own and another'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 - just as much an author as a writer).

Postmodern literature in the last 2 years has been presented in a very diverse way. 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 the "new Gogol" by critics, publishes "Nails", pseudo-nostalgic pseudo-memoirs, striking in their musicality, organicity and richness of language. Anastasia Gosteva (“Travel-Lamb”, “The Den of the Enlightened”), a representative of the new female prose, writes postmodern texts dedicated to the peculiarities of the “drug addict” consciousness. Yulia Kisina's book "Simple Desires" (Petersburg publishing house "Alethea"), also refers 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 nature. Human monstrousness is a cross-cutting theme of the work of Yuri Mamleev, known to readers from "Connecting Rods" and other books, in 2001 his new novel "Wandering Time" was published. Dmitry Bykov's sensational novel "Justification" amazingly combines postmodern strategies for constructing a text (a fantasy type of narration, playing "another story") with traditionally realistic ones designed for a "conservative" reader. Readers could get acquainted with the "philological" novels of Vladimir Novikov "A Romance with Language, or Sentimental Discourse", Sergei Nosov's "The Mistress of History", "Give Me a Monkey", Valery Iskhakov's "Chekhov's Reader" and "A Slight Taste of Treason".

contemporary modernism has its roots in the literature of the Silver Age. Most often, contemporary modernist authors who oppose themselves to "literature of verisimilitude" identify themselves with postmodernist writers, however superficially, at the level of "postmodernism as a manner of writing." The internal difference between modernism and postmodernism is that the vertical in the system of values ​​has not been destroyed: the classical 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 postmodernist one undoubtedly goes back to the works of Daniil Kharms. Tatyana Tolstaya's novel "Kys", which received the Triumph Prize for 2001, combined the features of intellectual and popular 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 by the Explosion almost into the Stone Age. The modernist strategy of the author is manifested, on the one hand, in the rejection of the heritage of realistic traditions (this is an “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 some kind of Truth, to which the hero aspires, which is completely impossible in a postmodern novel. The parody of Tatyana Tolstaya's novel is not absolute: it ends where the realm of Truth, Goodness and Beauty begins.

Modern Russian realism exists in several varieties, the first of which isneo-critical realism. It has its roots in the "natural school" of Russian realism of the 19th century, with its pathos of denying reality and depicting all aspects of life without limitation. Modern naturalism, revived in the late 80s of the XX century, is associated primarily with the name of Sergei Kaledin ("Humble Cemetery", "Stroybat"). Many critics rank as naturalism (and even "darkness") the prose of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya of the 70-90s, Svetlana Vasilenko (until 1995, according to the writer), Vladimir Makanin. Among the new critical prose of 2001-2002. - Roman Senchin's story "Minus", depicting the hopeless life of a small Siberian town in the traditions of the natural school, Oleg Pavlov's "army" story "Karaganda deviatiny, or the Tale of the Last Days" (included, by the way, in the shortlist of the Booker Prize in 2002), the story of abandoned village of Alexander Titov with a demonstrative name: "The life that was not." The pathos of the texts conditionally referred to neo-critical realism is pessimistic. Disbelief in the “high” destiny of a person, the choice as a hero of a creature with a limited, narrowed, “drowsy”, according to critic E. Koksheneva, consciousness - all this predetermines the main patterns of style - heaviness, laconism and deliberate artlessness of the style.

The second, now rare, variety realism - ontological or metaphysical realism, which flourished in the 70s of the XX 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 to seek and equip one's own place under the sun. A Russian person can comprehend this meaning only through unity, through "catholicity", 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 coexists with symbolist ones. New, today's ontological realists are also looking not for obvious causal relationships of life phenomena, but for its mystical and sacred Christian meaning. Reality, which is understood as standing in the face of God, temporal 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, proposed by the scholar and critic Mark Lipovetsky, was introduced to designate artistic attempts to comprehend the existential duel of the individual 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 verification and fitting, the idea of ​​connectedness and the belief in the incompletion and insolubility of the duel of the individual with chaos. The novel Grasshopper's Funeral by Nikolai Kononov (one of the winners of the Apollon Grigoriev Prize) is a story about the hero's childhood, about how his grandmother died, and he and his mother followed her, with all the horrors of caring for a paralyzed woman. But naturalistic descriptions are harmonized by the language of the novel, its internal poetic rhythm, repetitions, and an 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 last work, which was included in the top three laureates of the Apollon Grigoriev Prize, is Immortal. A story about a real person. "Immortal" Slavnikova, at first glance, a phantasmagoria with a touch of furious pamphlet. The heroes of the story are poor provincials knocked out of the "usual" Soviet existence. However, the sick, unfortunate, sometimes scary inhabitants 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 terrible book, but it is not an apology for fear at all. 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 a multidimensional and free word. 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 claimed by almost all well-known 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 simple feelings of a private, “small”, non-heroic person has become extremely relevant in today's literature. In dramaturgy, the plays of Yevgeny Grishkovets are classified as neo-sentimentalism, in poetry - by Timur Kibirov, in prose - most of the works of women's prose. It is significant that Lyudmila Ulitskaya became the winner of the Booker Prize in 2001 with her neo-sentimentalist novel The Kukotsky Case. The novel is saturated with childish freshness of feelings. L. Ulitskaya comments on the title and concept of her novel in the following way: “Casus is a case. I told about the case of Kukotsky - about a man and his fate. This incident seems to me an incident of each of us. Any person is a specific case in the hand of the Lord God, in the world compote in which we all swim ... In this case, this is Kukotsky. But it can be an incident of everyone who carefully observes life, fearlessly and honestly looks at the world ... ". Something similar can be said about the heroes of the story "Girls", the novel "Tsyu-yurih". And yet, the neo-sentimentalism of recent years is not equal to Karamzin's sentimentalism: the sensitivity of the newest time, as it were, has 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”. So, for example, Andrey Dmitriev's story "The Way Back", which won the "big" Apollon Grigoriev Prize in 2002, is a story about how the nanny of a boy who has now become a writer went to the store, but instead ended up, along with a cheerful company, far from Pskov - in the Pushkin mountains, where the next birthday of the first poet was officially and drunkenly celebrated. “Cathedral” jubilation-libation (everyone loves Pushkin, and at the same time each other) is replaced by penniless hangover loneliness: the drinking companions have disappeared, and the heroine has to walk a many kilometers “road back”. The story is encrusted with inconspicuous Pushkin quotes, the illiterate, but having bought collections of poems with her last pennies, Maria is seen as a sick double of the legendary Arina Rodionovna, her spree and hangover, melancholy and humility, a penchant for fantasizing and earthiness, unrestraint, roguishness and clumsy affection for the "master's children" at once deadly real and mythical. Without knowing it herself, the dissolute passion-bearer secretly educates the narrator. He learned to read from the same penny book, which contained the most important verses, and Maria’s desperate journey became part of the soul, which is destined to comprehend what a “cruel age”, “a vague hangover”, “striped miles”, “fatal passions”, “secret freedom”, “good feelings” Russia, which you can’t exchange for anything.

A special kind of modern literature, which cannot be ignored due to its increasing importance - This popular literature. It is possible to separate mass and non-mass literature according to various criteria: in this case, the following feature seems to be productive: following a stable genre canon. Mass literature consists of stable genre schemes such as detective story, romance novel, etc. The more fully the author follows the genre canon, the more "reliable" his success as a reader. 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 popular and intellectual literature.

The most striking development in this area isdetective series by Boris Akunin. In the last 2 years, this is the end of the “provincial” series - the novel “Pelagia and the Black Monk”, the continuation of the “Fandorinsky” and “post-Fandorinsky” series - “Altyn-Tolobas”, the diptych “Lover (tsa) 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 a project implementation: “... 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-component, intricate drawing. Therefore, the 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 idea about the main books of Russian literature in the amount of average erudition of a university graduate, not necessarily a humanitarian one (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 the parodic rethinking of well-known stories (“Anna Karenina” in “The Jack of Spades”), as well as quoting and stylizing them. He does not feel like a stranger in the past: he plunges into the language of the literature of those years, reproduced by the average dictionary of the classic, sees characters and situations that resemble what he once read. According to the critic, "Russian classics have acquired a pleasant presentation and now affect the mind and emotions not in an exciting, but in a calming way." The idea of ​​B. Akunin includes not only the creation of all possible variants of the detective genre, as reported on the cover of each book, but also the consistent projection of the main plot of each of the novels on the key texts of Russian literature, arranged in historical order - from Karamzin's "Poor Liza" to the first time of the action of "Azazele" before "Slum People" by Gilyarovsky in "The Lover of Death". The novel "Extracurricular Reading" is built as a postmodern text, with its philosophy of a single and endless text of culture: the title of each chapter is also 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 80s and 90s of the 19th century for more than two decades. The works of L. Yuzefovich about the legendary detective Ivan Dmitrievich Putilin (one of the latest - "Harlequin Costume", "Prince of the Wind"), due to the hero's occupations, have a detective basis, but they are not actually detectives: this is traditional realistic prose, novels of characters that have long had a stable a circle of adherents who value equally the professionalism of a historian and the talent of a writer, a connoisseur of the past alien to the conjuncture, possessing a leisurely intonation, excellent language. as a series of "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 Zaychik. The genre in which "The Story of the Greedy Barbarian", "The Case of the Independent Dervishes", "The Case of Igor's Campaign", "The Case of the Victorious Monkey" are written can be defined as a "utopian detective story". Some critics speak of van Zaichik's post-postmodernism, that is, the homely, cozy, non-revolutionary use of postmodernist strategies. Indeed, in the novels of van Zaichik, 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 a genre that is massive in its essence and its intellectual content.

In addition to the "intelligent" historical and utopian detective stories, the ironic detective story is incredibly spreading. The books of Darya Dontsova (of the last ones are “A Bouquet of Beautiful Ladies”, “Smile of 45th Caliber”, “Fig Leaf Couture”, “Walking Under the Fly”. “Miracles in a Saucepan”) date back to the novels of Ioanna Khmelevskaya, whose success in Russia, obviously, was the reason for the appearance of Russian ironic detectives. Dontsova's novels, unlike her Polish colleague, do not go beyond mass literature and do not create a new synthesis of intellectuality and mass character. The heroine Dontsova, a middle-aged lady, pretty, wealthy and educated, unlike Pani Joanna, ironically over everything and everyone, does not have the ability to self-irony, which leads to an abundance of banalities and tactlessness and a high degree of predictability of her investigations.

If detectives are arranged on a scale of irony - seriousness (“hard” detective), then Andrei Kivinov’s stories “It’s Served to Die”, “Slaughter” Department will be located first, then - Alexandra Marinina’s “Unlocked Door”, “Phantom of Memory”, followed by stories Tatyana Polyakova "The Young Lady and the Hooligan", "Ghostbusters", "Fitness for Little Red Riding Hood", Alexander Bushkov closes the scale "The Vulture", "Bulldog Fight", "Piranha: First Throw". "Indecent dance".

Apparently, mass literature is needed no less than intellectual literature - it has its own functions, its own tasks. At the non/fiction intellectual literature book fair in Moscow in November of this year, the majority of visitors spoke out against the division of 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 is not alive in single pockets for reading in the subway. Yuri Davydov, Chairman of the Booker Jury 2001, admitted that he faced a very difficult choice and it was extremely difficult for him to name just one work as the best. “I had to read many works, but strangely enough, I did not 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 satisfied with the high quality of prose." So there really is no reason for pessimism.


Modern literary process

Literature is an integral part of a person's life, his kind of photography, which perfectly describes all internal states, as well as social laws. Like history, literature develops, changes, becomes qualitatively new. Of course, one cannot say that modern literature is better or worse than that which was earlier. She's just different. Now there are other literary genres, other problems that the author covers, other authors, after all. But whatever one may say, the “Pushkins” and “Turgenevs” are not the same now, the time is not right now. Sensitive, always quiveringly responding to the mood of the time, Russian literature today shows, as it were, a panorama of a divided soul, in which the past and the present are intertwined in a bizarre way. Literary process since the 80s. of the twentieth century, marked its unconventionality, dissimilarity to the previous stages in the development of the artistic word. There was a change of artistic eras, the evolution of the creative consciousness of the artist. Moral and philosophical problems are at the center of modern books. The writers themselves, participating in disputes about the modern literary process, perhaps agree on one thing: the latest literature is interesting already because it aesthetically reflects our time. So, A. Varlamov writes: " Today's literature, whatever crisis it may be in, saves time. This is its purpose, the future - this is its addressee, for the sake of which one can endure the indifference of both the reader and the ruler".P. Aleshkovsky continues the thought of his colleague:" One way or another, literature constructs life. Builds a model, tries to hook, highlight certain types. The plot, as you know, has not changed since antiquity. Overtones are important ... There is a writer - and there is Time - something non-existent, elusive, but alive and pulsating - something with which the writer always plays cat and mouse".

Back in the early 1980s, two camps of writers took shape in Russian literature: representatives of Soviet literature and representatives of the literature of the Russian emigration. It is interesting that with the death of the outstanding Soviet writers Trifonov, Kataev, Abramov, the camp of Soviet literature became significantly impoverished. There were no new writers in the Soviet Union. The concentration of a significant part of the creative intelligentsia abroad led to the fact that hundreds of poets, writers, figures in various fields of culture and art continued to work outside their homeland. And only since 1985, for the first time after a 70-year break, Russian literature got the opportunity to be a single whole: the literature of the Russian abroad of all three waves of Russian emigration merged with it - after the civil war of 1918-1920, after World War II and the Brezhnev era. Returning back, the works of emigration quickly joined the flow of Russian literature and culture. Literary texts that were banned during the period of their writing (the so-called "returned literature") became participants in the literary process. Domestic literature has been significantly enriched by previously banned works, such as A. Platonov's novels "The Pit" and "Chevengur", E. Zamyatin's dystopia "We", B. Pilnyak's story "Mahogany", "Doctor Zhivago" by B. Pasternak, " Requiem" and "Poem without a Hero" by A. Akhmatova and many others. "All these authors are united by the pathos of studying the causes and consequences of deep social deformations" (N. Ivanova "Questions of Literature").

There are three main components of the modern literary process: the literature of the Russian diaspora; "returned" literature; actual modern literature. To give a clear and concise definition of the last of them is still not an easy task. In modern literature, such trends as avant-garde and post-avant-garde, modern and postmodern, surrealism, impressionism, neo-sentimentalism, metarealism, sotsart, conceptualism, etc. have appeared or revived.

But against the backdrop of postmodern tendencies, "classical, traditional" literature also continues to exist: neorealists, post-realists, and traditionalists not only continue to write, but also actively fight against the "pseudo-literature" of postmodernity. It can be said that the entire literary community has been divided into those who are "for" and those who are "against" new trends, and literature itself has become an arena for the struggle of two large blocs - traditionalist writers who focus on the classical understanding of artistic creativity, and postmodernists, who hold radically different views. This struggle influences both the ideological content and the formal levels of the emerging works.

The complex picture of aesthetic dispersion is complemented by the situation in the field of Russian poetry at the end of the century. It is generally accepted that prose dominates the modern literary process. Poetry bears the same burden of time, the same features of a confused and scattered era, the same aspirations to enter new specific zones of creativity. Poetry, more painfully than prose, feels the loss of the reader's attention, of its own role as an emotional exciter of society.

In the 1960s and 1980s, poets entered Soviet literature, bringing with them a lot of new things and developing old traditions. The themes of their work are diverse, and poetry is deeply lyrical and intimate. But the theme of the Motherland has never left the pages of our literature. Her images, connected either with the nature of her native village, or with the places where a person fought, can be found in almost every work. And each author has his own perception and feeling of the Motherland. We find penetrating lines about Russia in Nikolai Rubtsov (1936-1971), who feels himself to be the heir to centuries of Russian history. Critics believe that the work of this poet combined the traditions of Russian poetry of the 19th-20th centuries - Tyutchev, Fet, Blok, Yesenin.

Our contemporaries invariably associate the name of Rasul Gamzatov (1923) with eternal themes. Sometimes they say about him that his future path is difficult to predict. He is so unexpected in his work: from winged jokes to the tragic "Cranes", from the prose "encyclopedia" "My Dagestan" to the aphorisms "Inscriptions on daggers". But still it is not difficult to isolate the topics on which his poetry rests. This is devotion to the Motherland , respect for elders, admiration for a woman, a mother, a worthy continuation of the father's work... Reading the poems of Rubtsov, Gamzatov, and other remarkable poets of our time, you see the vast life experience of a person who in his poems expresses what is difficult for us to express.

One of the main ideas of modern poetry is citizenship, the main thoughts are conscience and duty. Yevgeny Yevtushenko belongs to public poets, patriots, citizens. His work is a reflection on his generation, on kindness and malice, on opportunism, cowardice and careerism.

The role of dystopia

Genre diversity and blurring of boundaries for a long time did not allow to detect typological patterns in the evolution of literature genres at the end of the century. However, the second half of the 1990s already made it possible to observe a certain commonality in the picture of the diffusion of the genres of prose and poetry, in the emergence of innovations in the field of the so-called "new drama". It is obvious that large prose forms have left the stage of artistic prose, and the "credit of trust" in authoritarian narration has been lost. First of all, it experienced the genre of the novel. Modifications of his genre changes demonstrated the process of "coagulation", giving way to small genres with their openness to various types of form creation.

Anti-utopia occupies a special place in genre creation. Losing formal rigid features, it is enriched by new qualities, the main of which is a kind of worldview. Anti-utopia has had and continues to have an impact on the formation of a special type of artistic thinking, such as statements on the principle of "photo negative". A feature of anti-utopian thought lies in the destructive ability to break the habitual patterns of perception of the surrounding life. Aphorisms from the book Vic. Erofeev's "Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul" ironically, "from the opposite" formulate this type of relationship between literature and reality: "A Russian has an apocalypse every day", "Our people will live badly, but not for long." Classic examples of anti-utopia such as the novel "We" by E. Zamyatin, "Invitation to the Execution" by V. Nabokov, "Castle" by F. Kafka, "Animal Farm" and "1984" by J. Orwell, at one time played the role of prophecies. Then these books stood on a par with others, and most importantly, with another reality that opened its abysses. "Utopias are terrible because they come true," N. Berdyaev once wrote. A classic example is A. Tarkovsky's "Stalker" and the subsequent Chernobyl disaster with the Death Zone deployed around these places. The "inner hearing" of Makanin's gift led the writer to the phenomenon of a dystopian text: The issue of the Novy Mir magazine with V. Makanin's dystopian story "The One-Day War" was signed for publication exactly two weeks before September 11, 2001, when the terrorist strike that hit America was the beginning of the "uninvited war". The plot of the story, for all its fantasticness, seems written off from real events. The text looks like a chronicle of the events that followed in New York on September 11, 2001. Thus, the writer writing a dystopia is moving along the path of gradually drawing the real outlines of the very abyss into which humanity, man, is striving. Among such writers, the figures of V. Pietsukh, A. Kabakov, L. Petrushevskaya, V. Makanin, V. Rybakov, T. Tolstoy and others stand out.

In the 1920s, E. Zamyatin, one of the founders of Russian anti-utopia, promised that literature in the 20th century would come to combine the fantastic with everyday life and become that diabolical mixture, the secret of which Hieronymus Bosch knew so well. The literature of the end of the century exceeded all expectations of the Master.

Classification of modern Russian literature.

Modern Russian literature is classified into:

neoclassical prose

Conditionally metaphorical prose

"Other prose"

Postmodernism

Neoclassical prose addresses the social and ethical problems of life, proceeding from the realistic tradition, inheriting the "teacher's" and "preach" orientation of Russian classical literature. The life of society in neoclassical prose is the main theme, and the meaning of life is the main problem. The author's worldview is expressed through the hero, the hero himself inherits an active life position, he takes on the role of a judge. The peculiarity of neoclassical prose is that the author and the hero are in a state of dialogue. It is characterized by a naked look at the terrible, monstrous in its cruelty and immorality phenomena of our life, but the principles of love, kindness, brotherhood - and, most importantly, catholicity - determine the existence of a Russian person in it. Representatives of neoclassical prose include: V. Astafiev "The Sad Detective", "The Damned and the Killed", "The Jolly Soldier", V. Rasputin "To the Same Land", "Fire", B. Vasiliev "Satisfy My Sorrows", A. Pristavkin "A golden cloud spent the night", D. Bykov "Spelling", M. Vishnevetskaya "The moon came out of the fog", L. Ulitskaya "The Case of Kukotsky", "Medea and her children", A. Volos "Real Estate", M. Paley " Kabiria from the Obvodny Canal.

In conventionally metaphorical prose, myth, fairy tale, scientific concept form a bizarre, but recognizable modern world. Spiritual inferiority, dehumanization acquire material embodiment in a metaphor, people turn into different animals, predators, werewolves. Conditional-metaphorical prose sees absurdity in real life, guesses catastrophic paradoxes in everyday life, uses fantastic assumptions, tests the hero with extraordinary possibilities. She is not characterized by the psychological volume of character. A characteristic genre of conventionally metaphorical prose is dystopia. Conditionally metaphorical prose includes the following authors and their works: F. Iskander "Rabbits and Boas", V. Pelevin "The Life of Insects", "Omon Ra", D. Bykov "Justification", T. Tolstaya "Kys", V. Makanin "Laz", V. Rybakov "Gravilet", "Tsesarevich", L. Petrushevskaya "New Robinsons", A. Kabakov "Defector", S. Lukyanenko "Spectrum".

"Other prose", in contrast to conventionally metaphorical, does not create a fantastic world, but reveals the fantastic in the surrounding, real. It usually depicts a destroyed world, life, a broken history, a torn culture, a world of socially "shifted" characters and circumstances. It is characterized by the features of opposition to officialdom, the rejection of established stereotypes, of moralizing. The ideal in it is either implied or looms, and the author's position is disguised. Plots are random. The "other prose" is not characterized by the traditional dialogue between the author and the reader. Representatives of this prose are: V. Erofeev, V. Pietsukh, T. Tolstaya, L. Petrushevskaya, L. Gabyshev.

Postmodernism is one of the most influential cultural phenomena of the second half of the 20th century. In postmodernism, the image of the world is built on the basis of intracultural ties. The will and laws of culture are higher than the will and laws of "reality". In the late 1980s, it became possible to talk about postmodernism as an integral part of literature, but by the beginning of the 21st century, we have to state the end of the "postmodern era". The most characteristic definitions that accompany the concept of "reality" in the aesthetics of postmodernism are chaotic, changeable, fluid, incomplete, fragmentary; the world is the "scattered links" of being, forming into bizarre and sometimes absurd patterns of human lives or into a temporarily frozen picture in the kaleidoscope of universal history. Unshakable universal values ​​lose their status as an axiom in the postmodern worldview. Everything is relative. N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky write about this very accurately in their article "Life after death, or New information about realism": "The unbearable lightness of being," the weightlessness of all hitherto unshakable absolutes (not only universal, but also tragic state of mind that postmodernism has expressed".

Russian postmodernism had a number of features. First of all, this is a game, demonstrativeness, outrageousness, playing with quotes from classical and socialist realist literature. Russian postmodern creativity is non-judgmental creativity, containing categoricalness in the subconscious, outside the text. Russian postmodern writers include: V. Kuritsyn "Dry Thunderstorms: Flickering Zone", V. Sorokin "Blue Fat", V. Pelevin "Chapaev and Emptiness", V. Makanin "Underground, or a Hero of Our Time", M. Butov "Freedom", A. Bitov "Pushkin House", V. Erofeev "Moscow - Petushki", Y. Buyda "Prussian Bride".

A people deprived of public freedom has the only tribune, from the height of which it makes you hear the cry of your indignation and your conscience,” A.I. Herzen wrote in the last century. For the first time in the entire long history of Russia, the government has now given us freedom of speech and the press. But, despite the enormous role of the media, Russian literature is the ruler of thoughts, raises layer after layer of the problems of our history and life. Maybe E. Yevtushenko was right when he said: "in Russia - more than a poet! ..".

Today, one can very clearly trace the artistic, historical, socio-political significance of a literary work in connection with the socio-political situation of the era. This wording means that the features of the era are reflected in the theme chosen by the author, his characters, artistic means. These features can give a work of great social and political significance. So, in the era of the decline of serfdom and the nobility, a number of works about "superfluous people" appeared, including the famous "Hero of Our Time" by M.Yu. Lermontov. The very name of the novel, the controversy surrounding it, showed its social significance in the era of the Nikolaev reaction. A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published during the period of criticism of Stalinism in the early 60s, was also of great importance. Modern works demonstrate an even greater connection between the era and the literary work than before. Now the task is to revive the rural owner. Literature responds to it with books about the dekulakization and depeasantization of the countryside.

The closest connection between modernity and history even gives rise to new genres (for example, the chronicle) and new visual means: documents are introduced into the text, time travel for many decades is popular, and more. The same applies to environmental issues. Can't take it anymore. The desire to help society makes writers, such as Valentin Rasputin, move from novels and short stories to journalism.

The first topic that unites a very large number of works written during the 50s - 80s is the problem of historical memory. The words of Academician D.S. Likhachev could serve as an epigraph to it: “Memory is active. It does not leave a person indifferent, inactive. She owns the mind and heart of man. Memory resists the destructive power of time. This is the greatest value of memory.

"Blank spots" were formed (or rather, they were formed by those who constantly adapted history to their interests) not only in the history of the whole country, but also in its individual regions. The book of Viktor Likhonosov "Our little Paris" about the Kuban. He believes that its historians are indebted to their land. "Children grew up without knowing their native history." About two years ago, the writer was in America, where he met with the inhabitants of the Russian colony, emigrants and their descendants from the Kuban Cossacks. A storm of reader letters and responses was caused by the publication of the novel - the chronicle of Anatoly Znamensky "Red Days", which reported new facts from the history of the civil war on the Don. The writer himself did not immediately come to the truth and only in the sixties he realized that "we do not know anything at all about that era." In recent years, several new works have been published, such as Sergei Alekseev's novel "Sedition", but there is still a lot of unknown.

The theme of those who were innocently repressed and tortured during the years of Stalinist terror sounds particularly prominent. Great work was done by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago". In the afterword to the book, he says: “I stopped working not because I considered the book finished, but because there was no more life left for it. I not only ask for indulgence, but I want to shout: when the time comes, the opportunity - get together, friends, survivors, who know well, but write another comment next to this one ... "Thirty-four years have passed since they were written, no, stamped on heart, these words. Solzhenitsyn himself was correcting the book abroad, dozens of new testimonies have come out, and this call will remain, apparently, for many decades to the contemporaries of those tragedies, and to the descendants, before whom the archives of the executioners will finally be opened. After all, even the number of victims is unknown!.. The victory of democracy in August 1991 gives hope that the archives will soon be opened.

And therefore, the words of the already mentioned writer Znamensky seem to me not entirely true: “Yes, and how much had to be said about the past, it seems to me, has already been said by A.I. rock "Aldan - Semenov. Yes, and I myself 25 years ago, during the years of the so-called thaw, paid tribute to this topic; my story about the camps called "Without repentance" ... is published in the magazine "North" (N10, 1988)". No, I think witnesses, writers, and historians still have to work hard.

A lot has already been written about Stalin's victims and executioners. I note that the continuation of the novel “Children of the Arbat” by A. Rybakov “Thirty-fifth and Other Years” has been published, in which many pages are devoted to the secret springs of preparing and conducting trials of the 30s over the former leaders of the Bolshevik Party.

Thinking about Stalin's time, you involuntarily transfer your thoughts to the revolution. And today she is seen in many ways differently. “We are told that the Russian revolution brought nothing, that we have great poverty. Quite right. But ... We have a perspective, we see a way out, we have a will, a desire, we see a path ahead of us ... ”N. Bukharin wrote this way. Now we are wondering: what did this will do with the country, where did this path lead and where is the way out. In search of an answer, we begin to turn to the origins, to October.

It seems to me that A. Solzhenitsyn explores this deeper than anyone. And these questions are touched upon in many of his books. But the main thing of this writer about the origins and beginning of our revolution is the multi-volume "Red Wheel". We have already printed parts of it - "August the fourteenth", "October the sixteenth". The four-volume "March the Seventeenth" is also printed. Alexander Isaevich continues to work hard on the epic.

Solzhenitsyn persistently does not recognize not only the October, but also the February revolution, considering the overthrow of the monarchy a tragedy of the Russian people. He argues that the morality of the revolution and the revolutionaries is inhumane and inhumane, the leaders of the revolutionary parties, including Lenin, are unprincipled, they think, first of all, about personal power. It is impossible to agree with him, but it is also impossible not to listen, especially since the writer uses a huge number of facts and historical evidence. I would like to note that this outstanding writer has already agreed to return to his homeland.

Similar arguments about the revolution can be found in the memoirs of the writer Oleg Volkov "Immersion in Darkness". , an intellectual and a patriot in the best sense of the word, spent 28 years in prisons and exile. He writes: “During the more than two years that my father lived after the revolution, it was already clearly and irrevocably determined: a sharply tamed peasant and a somewhat softer bridle worker had to identify themselves with power. But it was no longer possible to talk about this, to expose imposture and deceit, to explain that the iron lattice of the new order leads to enslavement and the formation of an oligarchy. Yes, and it's useless ... "

Is this the way to evaluate the revolution?! It's hard to say, only time will tell the final verdict. Personally, I do not consider this point of view correct, but it is also difficult to refute it: after all, you will not forget either about Stalinism or about today's deep crisis. It is also clear that it is no longer possible to study the revolution and the civil revolution from the films “Lenin in October”, “Chapaev” or from the poems of V. Mayakovsky “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” and “Good”. The more we learn about this era, the more independently we will come to some conclusions. A lot of interesting things about this time can be found in Shatrov's plays, B. Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago", V. Grossman's story "Everything flows" and others.

If there are sharp differences in the assessment of the revolution, then everyone condemns Stalin's collectivization. And how can one justify it if it has led to the ruin of the country, the death of millions of industrious owners, to a terrible famine! And again I would like to quote Oleg Volkov about the time close to the “great turning point”:

“Then they were just setting up a mass transportation of robbed peasants to the abyss of the desert expanses of the North. For the time being, they snatched it out selectively: they would impose an “individual” unpaid tax, wait a little and - they would declare it a saboteur. And there - lafa: confiscate property and throw it in jail! ... "

Vasily Belov tells us about the front of the collective farm village in the novel "Eve". The continuation is the “Year of the Great Break, Chronicle of 9 Months”, which describes the beginning of collectivization. One of the truthful works about the tragedy of the peasantry during the period of collectivization is the novel - the chronicle of Boris Mozhaev "Men and Women". The writer, relying on documents, shows how that stratum in the countryside is formed and takes power, which thrives on the ruin and misfortune of fellow villagers and is ready to rage to please the authorities. The author shows that the perpetrators of "excesses" and "dizziness from success" are those who ruled the country.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save -» Literary review of the works of recent years. Literary writings!