Russian Postmodernist Fiction

This text offers a critical study of postmodernism in Russian literature. It takes some of the central issues of the critical debate to develop a conception of postmodern poetics as a dialogue with chaos and places Russian literature in the context of an enriched postmodernism.

The last ten years were decisive for Russia, not only in the political sphere, but also culturally as this period saw the rise and crystallization of Russian postmodernism. The essays, manifestos, and articles gathered here investigate various manifestations of this crucial cultural trend. Exploring Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, they provide a point of departure and a valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies which is currently insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. A brief but useful "Who's Who in Russian Postmodernism" as an appendix introduces many authors who have never before appeared in a reference work of this kind and renders this book essential reading for those interested in the latest trends in Russian intellectual life.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

Written from a non-Western point of view, this work offers a fresh perspective on the postcommunist literary scene. The four sections of the book - literature, ideology, culture and methodology - reflect the range of postmodernism in contemporary Russia.

An international team of leading experts provide the first comprehensive account of post-Soviet Russian literature.

Academic Paper from the year 2021 in the subject Russian / Slavic Languages, grade: A+, , language: English, abstract: This paper focuses exclusively on Postmodernism literature and analyze the 4 most common aesthetic codes. Postmodernism dismissed the central idea of modernist and avant-garde trends, which is the mythologization of existence and reality. These trends tended to create utopian or idealistic paradigms of life that transcended all forms of primitive negativity, such as violence, inhumanity, poverty, and depression. Postmodernism holds the idea that myths are just mere creations (created by certain people) that have no basis in reality, and that these myths are often used as a form of brainwashing or social coercion, which force the masses to believe in a single form of reality and way of existing. Postmodernism originally was a critique against Socialist Realism (the Communist myth), and now focuses on questioning and deconstructing all contemporary concepts, such as intelligence, beauty and happiness. However, Postmodernism is by no means an attempt to say that nothing in life is "real", rather, it holds an ambivalent view towards all ideas and points of view, deconstructing them, and then reconstructing them and amalgamating them into one big, playful whole. Thus, Postmodernism holds that all ideas have potential but refuses to side with any particular idea. It seeks to form a compromise that meets somewhere in the middle between 2 extreme polar ideas, whereas previous modernist trends believed that polar opposites were incompatible.

Presents essays and manifestos on recent Russian literature, culture, and religion

One of the most outstanding properties of Russian postmodernist fiction is its reliance on metafictional devices which foreground aspects of the writing, reading or structure, and draw attention to the constructed nature of fiction writing. Some common metafictional strategies include overt commentary on the process of writing, the presence of an obtrusive narrator, dehumanization of character, total breakdown of temporal and spatial organization and the undermining of specific literary conventions. This book examines the most representative postmodernist texts and addresses the following questions: How widespread is the use of metafiction in contemporary Russian literature? What are its most pronounced forms? What is the function of metafictional devices? How innovative are Russian postmodernist writers in their use of metafictional techniques? This study reveals the unique contribution of postmodernist writers to the development of Russian literature through their systematic use of metafiction and their bold experimentation with new metafictional devices on all the principal levels of the text, including narration, plot, characterization, setting and language.