Postmodernism in Russian literature of the late 20th - early 21st centuries. Postmodernism in literature Postmodernism in Russian literature of the late 20th century

Postmodernism

The end of World War II marked an important turn in the worldview of Western civilization. The war was not only a clash of states, but also a clash of ideas, each of which promised to make the world ideal, and in return brought rivers of blood. Hence the feeling of crisis of the idea, that is, disbelief in the possibility of any idea to make the world a better place. A crisis of the idea of ​​art also arose. On the other hand, the number of literary works has reached such a quantity that it seems as if everything has already been written, each text contains links to previous texts, that is, it is a metatext.

During the development of the literary process, the gap between elite and pop culture became too deep, the phenomenon of “works for philologists” appeared, to read and understand which you need to have a very good philological education. Postmodernism became a reaction to this split, connecting both spheres of the multi-layered work. For example, Suskind's "Perfume" can be read as a detective story, or maybe as a philosophical novel that reveals questions of genius, the artist and art.

Modernism, which explored the world as the realization of certain absolutes, eternal truths, gave way to postmodernism, for which the whole world is a game without a happy ending. As a philosophical category, the term “postmodernism” spread thanks to the works of philosophers Zhe. Derrida, J. Bataille, M. Foucault and especially the book of the French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979).

The principles of repetition and compatibility turn into a style of artistic thinking with its inherent features of eclecticism, a tendency toward stylization, quotation, alteration, reminiscence, and allusion. The artist deals not with “pure” material, but with culturally mastered material, because the existence of art in previous classical forms is impossible in a post-industrial society with its unlimited potential for serial reproduction and replication.

The Encyclopedia of Literary Movements and Movements provides the following list of features of postmodernism:

1. Cult of the independent personality.

2. Craving for the archaic, for myth, for the collective unconscious.

3. The desire to combine and complement the truths (sometimes polar opposite) of many people, nations, cultures, religions, philosophies, a vision of everyday real life as a theater of the absurd, an apocalyptic carnival.

4. The use of an emphatically playful style to emphasize the abnormality, non-authenticity, and anti-naturalness of the prevailing lifestyle in reality.

5. A deliberately bizarre interweaving of different storytelling styles (high classicist and sentimental or crudely naturalistic and fairy-tale, etc.; scientific, journalistic, business, etc. styles are often woven into the artistic style).

6. A mixture of many traditional genre varieties.

7. The plots of the works are easily disguised allusions (hints) to well-known plots of literature of previous eras.

8. Borrowings and overlaps are observed not only at the plot-compositional level, but also at the reverse linguistic level.

9. As a rule, in a postmodern work there is an image of a narrator.

10. Irony and parody.

The main features of postmodern poetics are intertextuality (creating one’s own text from others); collage and montage (“gluing together” equal fragments); use of allusions; attraction to prose of a complicated form, in particular, with a free composition; bricolage (indirect achievement of the author's intention); saturation of the text with irony.

Postmodernism develops in the genres of fantastic parable, confessional novel, dystopia, short story, mythological story, socio-philosophical and socio-psychological novel, etc. Genre forms can be combined, opening up new artistic structures.

Günter Grass (“The Tin Drum”, 1959) is considered the first postmodernist. Outstanding representatives of postmodern literature: V. Eco, H.-L. Borges, M. Pavich, M. Kundera, P. Süskind, V. Pelevin, I. Brodsky, F. Begbeder.

In the second half of the 20th century. The genre of science fiction is becoming more active, which in its best examples is combined with prognostication (forecasts for the future) and dystopia.

In the pre-war period, existentialism emerged and actively developed after the Second World War. Existentialism (Latin existentiel - existence) is a direction in philosophy and the movement of modernism, in which the source of a work of art is the artist himself, expressing the life of the individual, creating an artistic reality that reveals the mystery of being in general. The sources of existentialism were contained in the works of the German thinker of the 19th century. From Kierkegaard.

Existentialism in works of art reflects the sentiments of the intelligentsia, disillusioned with social and ethical theories. Writers strive to understand the reasons for the tragic disorder of human life. The categories of the absurdity of existence, fear, despair, loneliness, suffering, and death come first. Representatives of this philosophy argued that the only thing a person has is his inner world, the right to choose, and free will.

Existentialism is spreading in French (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre, etc.), German (E. Nossack, A. Döblin), English (A. Murdoch, V. Golding), Spanish (M. de Unamuno), American (N. Mailer, J. Baldwin), Japanese (Kobo Abe) literature.

In the second half of the 20th century. a “new novel” (“anti-novel”) is developing - a genre similarity to the French modern novel of the 1940-1970s, which arises as a negation of existentialism. Representatives of this genre are N. Sarraute, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor, C. Simon and others.

A significant phenomenon of the theatrical avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century. is the so-called “theater of the absurd”. The dramaturgy of this direction is characterized by the absence of place and time of action, the destruction of plot and composition, irrationalism, paradoxical collisions, and a fusion of the tragic and the comic. The most talented representatives of the “theater of the absurd” are S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, E. Albee, G. Frisch and others.

A noticeable phenomenon in the global process of the second half of the 20th century. became “magical realism” - a direction in which elements of the real and the imaginary, the real and the fantastic, the everyday and the mythological, the probable and the mysterious, everyday existence and eternity are organically combined. It gained the greatest development in Latin American literature (A. Carpenter, G. Amado, G. García Márquez, G. Vargas Llosa, M. Asturias, etc.). A special role in the work of these authors is played by myth, which serves as the basis of the work. A classic example of magical realism is G. García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), where the history of Colombia and all of Latin America is recreated in mythical-real images.

In the second half of the 20th century. Traditional realism is also developing, acquiring new features. The depiction of individual existence is combined with historical analysis, which is due to the desire of artists to understand the logic of social laws (G. Bell, E.-M. Remarque, V. Bykov, N. Dumbadze, etc.).

Literary process of the second half of the 20th century. determined primarily by the transition from modernism to postmodernism, as well as the powerful development of intellectual trends, science fiction, “magical realism,” avant-garde phenomena, etc.

Postmodernism was widely discussed in the West in the early 1980s. Some researchers consider the beginning of postmodernism to be Joyce’s novel “Finnegan’s Wake” (1939), others - Joyce’s preliminary novel “Ulysses”, others - American “new poetry” of the 40-50s, others think that postmodernism is not a fixed chronological phenomenon, and the spiritual state and “every era has its own postmodernism” (Eco), while others generally speak about postmodernism as “one of the intellectual fictions of our time” (Yu. Andrukhovich). However, most scholars believe that the transition from modernism to postmodernism occurred in the mid-1950s. In the 60-70s, postmodernism embraced various national literatures, and in the 80s it became the dominant trend in modern literature and culture.

The first manifestations of postmodernism can be considered such movements as the American school of “black humor” (W. Burroughs, D. Warth, D. Barthelme, D. Donlivy, K. Kesey, K. Vonnegut, D. Heller, etc.), the French “new novel" (A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarraute, M. Butor, C. Simon, etc.), "theater of the absurd" (E. Ionesco, S. Beckett, J. Gonit, F. Arrabal, etc.) .

The most prominent postmodern writers include the English John Fowles (“The Collector,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”), Julian Barnes (“A History of the World in Nine and a Half Chapters”) and Peter Ackroyd (“Milton in America”), and the German Patrick Suskind (“ Perfumer"), Austrian Karl Ransmayr ("The Last World"), Italians Italo Calvino ("Slowness") and Umberto Eco ("The Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum"), Americans Thomas Pynchon ("Entropy", "For Sale No. 49" ) and Vladimir Nabokov (English-language novels “Pale Fire”, etc.), Argentines Jorge Luis Borges (short stories and essays) and Julio Cortazar (“Hopscotch”).

A prominent place in the history of the newest postmodern novel is occupied by its Slavic representatives, in particular the Czech Milan Kundera and the Serb Milorad Pavic.

A specific phenomenon is Russian postmodernism, represented both by authors of the metropolis (A. Bitov, V. Erofeev, Ven. Erofeev, L. Petrushevskaya, D. Prigov, T. Tolstaya, V. Sorokin, V. Pelevin), and representatives of literary emigration ( V. Aksenov, I. Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov).

Postmodernism claims to express the general theoretical “superstructure” of modern art, philosophy, science, politics, economics, and fashion. Today they talk not only about “postmodern creativity”, but also about “postmodern consciousness”, “postmodern mentality”, “postmodern mentality”, etc.

Postmodern creativity presupposes aesthetic pluralism at all levels (plot, compositional, imagery, characterological, chronotopic, etc.), completeness of presentation without judgment, reading the text in a cultural context, co-creativity of the reader and writer, mythological thinking, a combination of historical and timeless categories, dialogue , irony.

The leading features of postmodern literature are irony, “quotational thinking,” intertextuality, pastiche, collage, and the principle of play.

In postmodernism, total irony reigns, general ridicule and ridicule from everywhere. Numerous postmodern works of art are characterized by a conscious focus on the ironic comparison of various genres, styles, and artistic movements. A work of postmodernism is always a ridicule of previous and unacceptable forms of aesthetic experience: realism, modernism, mass culture. Thus, irony overcomes the serious modernist tragedy inherent, for example, in the works of F. Kafka.

One of the main principles of postmodernism is quotation, and representatives of this direction are characterized by quotation-free thinking. American researcher B. Morrissett called postmodern prose “quotational literature.” Total postmodern quotation replaces elegant modernist reminiscence. An American student anecdote about how a philology student read Hamlet for the first time and was disappointed: nothing special, a collection of common catchphrases and expressions is quite postmodern. Some works of postmodernism turn into books of quotes. Thus, the novel by the French writer Jacques Rivet “The Young Ladies of A.” is a collection of 750 quotes from 408 authors.

The concept of intertextuality is also associated with postmodern quotation thinking. French researcher Yulia Kristeva, who introduces this term into literary circulation, noted: “Any text is built like a mosaic of quotations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text.” French semiotician Roland Karaulov wrote: “Every text is an intertext; other texts are present in it at various levels in more or less recognizable forms: texts of the previous culture and texts of the surrounding culture. Each text is a new fabric woven from old quotes.” Intertext in postmodern art is the main way of constructing a text and consists in the fact that the text is constructed from quotes from other texts.

If numerous modernist novels were also intertextual (“Ulysses” by J. Joyce, “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, “Doctor Faustus” by T. Mann, “The Glass Bead Game” by G. Hesse) and even realistic works (as proved by Yu. Tynyanov, Dostoevsky’s novel “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” is a parody of Gogol and his works), then it is precisely the achievement of postmodernism with hypertext. This is a text constructed in such a way that it turns into a system, a hierarchy of texts, while simultaneously constituting a unity and a plurality of texts. An example of this is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each article refers to other articles in the same publication. You can read such text in the same way: from one article to another, ignoring hypertext links; read all articles in a row or move from one link to another, carrying out “hypertext navigation”. Therefore, such a flexible device as hypertext can be manipulated at your discretion. in 1976, the American writer Ramon Federman published a novel called “At Your Discretion.” It can be read at the reader's request, from any place, shuffling unnumbered and bound pages. The concept of hypertext is also associated with computer virtual realities. Today's hypertexts are computer literature that can only be read on a monitor: by pressing one key, you are transported to the hero's backstory, by pressing another, you change the bad ending to a good one, etc.

A sign of postmodern literature is the so-called pastiche (from Italian pasbiccio - an opera composed of excerpts from other operas, a mixture, medley, pastiche). It is a specific version of parody, which changes its functions in postmodernism. Pastiche differs from parody in that now there is nothing to parody, there is no serious object that can be ridiculed. O. M. Freudenberg wrote that only that which is “living and holy” can be parodied. During the 24 hours of non-postmodernism, nothing “lives,” much less “sacred.” Pastiche is also understood as parody.

Postmodern art by its nature is fragmentary, discrete, eclectic. Hence such a characteristic of it as a collage. Postmodern collage may seem like a new form of modernist montage, but it is significantly different from it. In modernism, montage, although it was composed of incomparable images, was nevertheless united into a whole by the unity of style and technique. In a postmodern collage, on the contrary, various fragments of collected objects remain unchanged, not transformed into a single whole, each of them retains its isolation.

Important for postmodernism is the principle of play. Classical moral and ethical values ​​are translated into a playful plane, as M. Ignatenko notes, “yesterday’s classical culture and spiritual values ​​live dead in postmodernity - its era does not live with them, it plays with them, it plays with them, it absorbs them.”

Other characteristics of postmodernism include uncertainty, decanonization, carivalization, theatricality, hybridization of genres, reader co-creation, saturation with cultural realities, “dissolution of character” (complete destruction of the character as a psychologically and socially determined character), attitude to literature as the “first reality” (text does not reflect reality, but creates a new reality, even many realities, often independent of each other). And the most common metaphorical images of postmodernism are the centaur, carnival, labyrinth, library, madness.

A phenomenon of modern literature and culture is also multiculturalism, through which the multi-component American nation naturally realized the precarious uncertainty of postmodernism. A more “grounded” multicult) previously “voiced” thousands of equally unique living American voices of representatives of various racial, ethnic, gender, local and other specific streams. The literature of multiculturalism includes African-American, Indian, “Chicanos” (Mexicans and other Latin Americans, a significant number of whom live in the United States), literature of various ethnic groups inhabiting America (including Ukrainians), American descendants of immigrants from Asia, Europe, literature of minorities of all stripes .

Literary panorama of the second half of the 1990s. is determined by the interaction of two aesthetic trends: realistic, rooted in the tradition of previous literary history, and new, postmodern. Russian postmodernism as a literary and artistic movement is often associated with the period of the 1990s, although in fact it has a significant prehistory, dating back at least four decades. Its emergence was completely natural and was determined both by the internal laws of literary development and by a certain stage of social consciousness. Postmodernism is not so much aesthetics as philosophy, a type of thinking, a way of feeling and thinking that has found its expression in literature.

The claim to the total universality of postmodernism in both the philosophical and literary spheres became obvious by the second half of the 1990s, when this aesthetics and the artists representing it turned from literary fringes into rulers of the thoughts of a reading public that had thinned out by that time. It was then that Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin took the place of the key figures of modern literature, deliberately shocking the reader. The shock impression from their works on a person brought up on realistic literature is associated not only with external attributes, a deliberate violation of literary and general cultural speech etiquette (use of obscene language, reproduction of the jargon of the lowest social environment), the removal of all ethical taboos (detailed, deliberately understated depiction of multiple sexual acts and anti-aesthetic physiological manifestations), a fundamental rejection of realistic or at least somehow vitally rational motivation for the character’s character or behavior. The shock of encountering the works of Sorokin or Pelevin was caused by a fundamentally different understanding of the reality reflected in them than before; the doubt of the authors in the very existence of reality, private and historical time, cultural and socio-historical reality (novels “Chapaev and Emptiness”, “Generation P” by V. O. Pelevin); deliberate destruction of classical realistic literary models, natural rationally explainable cause-and-effect relationships of events and phenomena, motivations for the actions of characters, the development of plot collisions ("Norma" and "Novel" by V. G. Sorokin). Ultimately - doubt in the possibility of rational explanations of existence. All this was often interpreted in literary critical periodicals of traditional realistically oriented publications as a mockery of the reader, literature, and people in general. It must be said that the texts of these writers, filled with sexual or fecal motives, fully provided grounds for such a critical interpretation. However, strict critics unwittingly became victims of literary provocation and followed the path of the most obvious, simple - and erroneous reading of the postmodern text.

Responding to numerous reproaches that he does not like people, that he mocks them in his works, V. G. Sorokin argued that literature is “a dead world”, and the people depicted in a novel or story are “not people, These are just letters on paper." The writer’s statement contains the key not only to his understanding of literature, but also to postmodern consciousness as a whole.

The point is that in its aesthetic basis, the literature of postmodernism is not just sharply opposed to realistic literature - it has a fundamentally different artistic nature. Traditional literary movements, which include classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism and, of course, realism, are one way or another focused on reality, which acts as the subject of the image. In this case, the relationship of art to reality can be very different. It can be determined by the desire of literature to imitate life (Aristotelian mimesis), to explore reality, to study it from the point of view of socio-historical processes, which is characteristic of classical realism, to create some ideal models of social relations (classicism or realism of N. G. Chernyshevsky, the author of the novel " What to do?”), directly influence reality, changing a person, “shaping” him, drawing various social masks-types of his era (socialist realism). In any case, the fundamental correlation and relevance of literature and reality is beyond doubt. Exactly

Therefore, some scholars propose to characterize such literary movements or creative methods as primary aesthetic systems.

The essence of postmodern literature is completely different. It does not at all set as its task (at least, so it is declared) the study of reality; Moreover, the very correlation between literature and life, the connection between them is denied in principle (literature is “a dead world”, heroes are “just letters on paper”). In this case, the subject of literature is not the true social or ontological reality, but the previous culture: literary and non-literary texts from different eras, perceived outside the traditional cultural hierarchy, which makes it possible to mix the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, high style and semi-literate vernacular, poetry and thieves' jargon. The subject of literature is mythology, mainly socialist realism, incompatible discourses, reinterpreted fates of folklore and literary characters, everyday clichés and stereotypes, most often unreflected, existing at the level of the collective unconscious.

Thus, the fundamental difference between postmodernism and, say, realistic aesthetics is that it is secondary an artistic system that explores not reality, but past ideas about it, chaotically, bizarrely and unsystematically mixing and rethinking them. Postmodernism as a literary-aesthetic system or creative method is prone to deep self-reflection. He develops his own metalanguage, a complex of specific concepts and terms, and forms around himself a whole corpus of texts that describe his vocabulary and grammar. In this sense, it appears as a normative aesthetics, in which the work of art itself is preceded by previously formulated theoretical norms of its poetics.

The theoretical foundations of postmodernism were laid in the 1960s. among French scientists and poststructuralist philosophers. The birth of postmodernism is illuminated by the authority of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Francois Lyotard, who created a scientific structural-semiotic school in France in the middle of the last century, which predetermined the birth and expansion of an entire literary movement in both European and Russian literature . Russian postmodernism is a completely different phenomenon from European, but the philosophical basis of postmodernism was created precisely then, and Russian postmodernism would be impossible without it, just like European one. That is why, before turning to the history of Russian postmodernism, it is necessary to dwell on its basic terms and concepts, developed almost half a century ago.

Among the works that lay the cornerstones of postmodern consciousness, it is necessary to highlight the articles of R. Barth "Death of the Author"(1968) and Y. Kristeva "Bakhtin, word, dialogue and novel"(1967). It was in these works that the basic concepts of postmodernism were introduced and substantiated: the world as a text, the death of the Author And birth of the reader, scriptor, intertext And intertextuality. The basis of postmodern consciousness is the idea of ​​the fundamental completeness of history, which is manifested in the exhaustion of the creative potential of human culture, the completeness of its circle of development. Everything that exists now has already been and will still be, history and culture move in circles, in essence, doomed to repetition and marking time. The same thing happens with literature: everything has already been written, it is impossible to create something new, a modern writer, willy-nilly, is doomed to repeat and even quote the texts of his distant and close predecessors.

This cultural attitude motivates the idea death of the Author. According to the theorists of postmodernism, a modern writer is not the author of his books, because everything he can write was written before him, much earlier. All he can do is quote, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, previous texts. In essence, a modern writer is only a compiler of previously created texts. Therefore, in postmodern criticism, “The author becomes smaller in stature, like a figure in the very depths of the literary stage.” Modern literary texts are created by scriptor(English - scriptor), fearlessly compiling texts from previous eras:

"His hand<...>makes a purely descriptive (and not expressive) gesture and outlines a certain sign field that does not have a starting point - in any case, it comes only from language as such, and it tirelessly calls into question any idea of ​​a starting point."

Here we encounter the fundamental concept of postmodern criticism. The death of the Author calls into question the very content of the text, saturated with the author's meaning. It turns out that the text cannot initially contain any meaning. This is “a multidimensional space where different types of writing combine and argue with each other, none of which is original; the text is woven from quotations that refer to thousands of cultural sources,” and the writer (i.e., scriptor) “can only imitate forever what was written before and was not written for the first time." This thesis of Barthes is the starting point for such a concept of postmodern aesthetics as intertextuality:

“...Any text is constructed as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text,” wrote Yu. Kristeva, justifying the concept of intertextuality.

At the same time, the infinite number of sources “absorbed” by the test loses their original meaning, if they ever had it, and enters into new semantic connections with each other, which only the reader. A similar ideology characterized the French poststructuralists in general:

“The scriptwriter, who has replaced the Author, carries within himself not passions, moods, feelings or impressions, but only such an immense vocabulary from which he draws his writing, which knows no stop; life only imitates the book, and the book itself is woven from signs, itself imitates something already forgotten, and so on ad infinitum."

But why, when reading a work, are we convinced that it still has meaning? Because it is not the author who puts meaning into the text, but reader. To the best of his talent, he brings together all the beginnings and ends of the text, thus putting his own meaning into it. Therefore, one of the postulates of the postmodernist worldview is the idea multiple interpretations of the work, each of which has the right to exist. Thus, the figure of the reader, its importance, increases immensely. The reader, who puts meaning into the work, seems to take the place of the author. The death of the Author is literature's price for the birth of the reader.

In essence, other concepts of postmodernism are based on these theoretical provisions. So, postmodern sensibility presupposes a total crisis of faith, a modern person’s perception of the world as chaos, where all original semantic and value orientations are absent. Intertextuality, implying a chaotic combination of codes, signs, symbols of previous texts in the text, leads to a special postmodern form of parody - pastiche, expressing total postmodernist irony over the very possibility of the existence of a single, once and for all fixed meaning. Simulacrum becomes a sign that does not mean anything, a sign of a simulation of reality, not correlated with it, but only with other simulacra, which create an unreal postmodern world of simulations and inauthenticities.

The basis of the postmodernist attitude towards the world of previous culture is its deconstruction. This concept is traditionally associated with the name of J. Derrida. The term itself, which includes two prefixes that are opposite in meaning ( de– destruction and con – creation) denotes ambiguity in relation to the object under study - text, discourse, mythology, any concept of the collective subconscious. The operation of deconstruction implies the destruction of the original meaning and its simultaneous creation.

"The meaning of deconstruction<...>consists in identifying the internal inconsistency of the text, in discovering in it hidden and unnoticed not only by the inexperienced, “naive” reader, but also residual meanings that elude the author himself (“sleeping”, in the words of Jacques Derrida), inherited from speech, otherwise - discursive practices of the past, enshrined in language in the form of unconscious thought stereotypes, which in turn, just as unconsciously and independently of the author of the text, are transformed under the influence of the linguistic clichés of the era."

Now it becomes clear that the very period of publishing, which simultaneously brought together different eras, decades, ideological guidelines, cultural preferences, diaspora and metropolis, writers living and those who passed away five to seven decades ago, created the ground for postmodern sensitivity and imbued magazine pages with obvious intertextuality. It was under these conditions that the expansion of postmodern literature in the 1990s became possible.

However, by that time Russian postmodernism had a certain historical and literary tradition, dating back to the 1960s. For very obvious reasons, until the mid-1980s. it was a marginal, underground, catacomb phenomenon of Russian literature - both literally and figuratively. For example, Abram Tertz’s book “Walking with Pushkin” (1966–1968), which is considered one of the first works of Russian postmodernism, was written in prison and sent out under the guise of letters to his wife. Roman by Andrey Bitov "Pushkin House"(1971) stood on par with the book by Abram Tertz. These works were brought together by a common subject of depiction - Russian classical literature and mythologies generated by more than a hundred years of tradition of its interpretation. It was they who became the object of postmodern deconstruction. A.G. Bitov wrote, by his own admission, “an anti-textbook of Russian literature.”

In 1970, a poem by Venedikt Erofeev was created "Moscow - Petushki", which gives a powerful impetus to the development of Russian postmodernism. Comically mixing many discourses of Russian and Soviet culture, immersing them in the everyday and speech situation of a Soviet alcoholic, Erofeev seemed to be following the path of classical postmodernism. Combining the ancient tradition of Russian foolishness, explicit or hidden quotation of classical texts, fragments of the works of Lenin and Marx memorized at school with the author-narrator’s experience of traveling on a commuter train in a state of severe intoxication, he achieved both the pastiche effect and the intertextual richness of the work, possessing a truly limitless semantic inexhaustibility, suggesting a multiplicity of interpretations. However, the poem “Moscow - Petushki” showed that Russian postmodernism is not always comparable to the canon of a similar Western movement. Erofeev fundamentally rejected the concept of the death of the Author. It was the view of the author-narrator that formed a single point of view on the world in the poem, and the state of intoxication seemed to sanction the complete absence of the cultural hierarchy of the semantic layers included in it.

Development of Russian postmodernism in the 1970s–1980s. went primarily in line conceptualism. Genetically, this phenomenon goes back to the “Lianozov” poetic school of the late 1950s, to the first experiments of V.N. Nekrasov. However, Moscow poetic conceptualism took shape as an independent phenomenon within Russian postmodernism in the 1970s. One of the founders of this school was Vsevolod Nekrasov, and the most prominent representatives were Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, and a little later Timur Kibirov.

The essence of conceptualism was thought of as a radical change in the subject of aesthetic activity: an orientation not towards the image of reality, but towards the knowledge of language in its metamorphoses. At the same time, the object of poetic deconstruction turned out to be speech and mental clichés of the Soviet era. It was an aesthetic reaction to the late, dead and ossified socialist realism with its worn-out formulas and ideologemes, slogans, and meaningless propaganda texts. They were thought of as concepts, the deconstruction of which was carried out by conceptualists. The author's "I" was absent, dissolved in "quotations", "voices", "opinions". In essence, the language of the Soviet era was subjected to total deconstruction.

The strategy of conceptualism manifested itself with particular clarity in creative practice Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov(1940–2007), the creator of many myths (including the myth of himself as a modern Pushkin), parodying Soviet ideas about the world, literature, life, love, the relationship between man and power, etc. In his work, Soviet ideologemes about Great Labor and omnipotent Power (the image of Militsaner) were transformed and postmodernly profaned. The mask images in Prigov’s poems, “the flickering sensation of the presence - absence of the author in the text” (L. S. Rubinstein) turned out to be a manifestation of the concept of the death of the Author. Parodic quotation, the removal of the traditional opposition of ironic and serious determined the presence of postmodern pastiche in a hundred poetry and, as it were, reproduced the categories of the mentality of the Soviet “little man.” In the poems “Here the cranes are flying in a scarlet stripe...”, “I found a number on my meter...”, “Here I am frying a chicken...” conveyed the psychological complexes of the hero and revealed a shift in the real proportions of the picture of the world. All this was accompanied by the creation of quasi-genres of Prigov’s poetry: “philosophems”, “pseudo-verses”, “pseudo-obituary”, “opus”, etc.

In creativity Lev Semenovich Rubinstein(b. 1947) “a more rigid version of conceptualism” was realized (M. N. Epstein). He wrote his poems on separate cards, and an important element of his work became performance – presentation of poems, their author's performance. Holding and sorting through cards on which a word was written, only one line of poetry, nothing was written, he seemed to emphasize a new principle of poetics - the poetics of “catalogues”, poetic “card indexes”. The card became an elementary unit of text, connecting poetry and prose.

“Each card,” the poet said, “is both an object and a universal unit of rhythm that aligns any speech gesture - from a detailed theoretical message to an interjection, from a stage direction to a snippet of a telephone conversation. A pack of cards is an object, a volume, it is NOT a book , this is the brainchild of the “non-Guttenbergian” existence of verbal culture."

A special place among conceptualists occupies Timur Yurievich Kibirov(b. 1955). Using the technical techniques of conceptualism, he comes to a different interpretation of the Soviet past than his older colleagues. We can talk about something peculiar critical sentimentalism Kibirov, which appeared in such poems as “To the Artist Semyon Faibisovich”, “Just say the word “Russia” ...”, “Twenty Sonnets to Sasha Zapoeva”. Traditional poetic themes and genres are not at all subject to total and destructive deconstruction by Kibirov. For example, the theme of poetic creativity is developed by him in poems - friendly messages to “L. S. Rubinstein”, “Love, Komsomol and Spring. D. A. Prigov”, etc. In this case there is no need to talk about the death of the Author: the activity of the author’s “I” "is manifested in the peculiar lyricism of Kibirov's poems and poems, in their tragicomic coloring. His poetry embodied the worldview of a man at the end of history, who is in a situation of cultural vacuum and suffers from it (“Draft reply to Gugolev”).

The central figure of modern Russian postmodernism can be considered Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin(b. 1955). The beginning of his work, which occurred in the mid-1980s, firmly connects the writer with conceptualism. He did not lose this connection in his subsequent works, although the modern stage of his work, of course, is broader than the conceptualist canon. Sorokin is a great stylist; the subject of image and reflection in his work is precisely style - both Russian classical and Soviet literature. L. S. Rubinstein very accurately described Sorokin’s creative strategy:

“All his works – varied thematically and in genre – are built, in essence, on one technique. I would describe this technique as “hysteria of style.” Sorokin does not describe so-called life situations - language (mainly literary language), its state and movement in time is the only (genuine) drama that occupies conceptual literature<...>The language of his works<...>as if he goes crazy and begins to behave inappropriately, which is actually adequacy of a different order. It is as lawless as it is lawful."

Indeed, Vladimir Sorokin’s strategy consists of a ruthless collision of two discourses, two languages, two incompatible cultural layers. Philosopher and philologist Vadim Rudnev describes this technique as follows:

"Most often his stories follow the same pattern. At first there is an ordinary, slightly overly juicy parody Sotsart text: a story about a hunt, a Komsomol meeting, a meeting of the party committee - but suddenly something completely unexpected and unmotivated happens<...>a breakthrough into something terrible and terrible, which, according to Sorokin, is real reality. It’s as if Pinocchio pierced a canvas with a painted fireplace with his nose, but found there not a door, but something like what is shown in modern horror films.”

Texts by V. G. Sorokin began to be published in Russia only in the 1990s, although he began actively writing 10 years earlier. In the mid-1990s, the writer's main works, created in the 1980s, were published. and already known abroad: the novels “Queue” (1992), “Norma” (1994), “Marina’s Thirtieth Love” (1995). In 1994, Sorokin wrote the story "Hearts of Four" and the novel "Roman". His novel “Blue Lard” (1999) became absolutely scandalous. In 2001, a collection of new stories, “The Feast,” was published, and in 2002, the novel “Ice” was published, in which the author allegedly breaks with conceptualism. The most representative books of Sorokin are “Novel” and “Feast”.

POSTMODERNISM IN LITERATURE is a literary movement that replaced modernity and differs from it not so much in originality as in the variety of elements, quotation, immersion in culture, reflecting the complexity, chaos, decentralization of the modern world; “spirit of literature” of the late 20th century; literature of the era of world wars, scientific and technological revolution and information “explosion”.

The term postmodernism is often used to describe the literature of the late 20th century. Translated from German, postmodernism means “what comes after modernity.” As often happens with something “invented” in the 20th century. prefix “post” (post-impressionism, post-expressionism), the term postmodernism indicates both the opposition to modernity and its continuity. Thus, the very concept of postmodernism reflects the duality (ambivalence) of the time that gave birth to it. The assessments of postmodernism by its researchers and critics are also ambiguous and often directly opposite.

Thus, in the works of some Western researchers, the culture of postmodernism received the name “loosely coupled culture.” (R. Merelman). T. Adorno characterizes it as a culture that reduces human capacity. I. Berlin is like a twisted tree of humanity. As the American writer John Barth put it, postmodernism is an artistic practice that sucks the juices from the culture of the past, a literature of exhaustion.

Postmodern literature, from the point of view of Ihab Hassan (The Dismemberment of Orpheus), is essentially anti-literature, since it transforms burlesque, grotesque, fantasy and other literary forms and genres into anti-forms that carry a charge of violence, madness and apocalypticism and turn the cosmos into chaos .

According to Ilya Kolyazhny, the characteristic features of Russian literary postmodernism are “a mocking attitude towards one’s past”, “the desire to go to the extreme in one’s home-grown cynicism and self-deprecation.” According to the same author, “the meaning of their (i.e., postmodernists’) creativity usually comes down to “fun” and “banter,” and as literary devices, “special effects,” they use profanity and frank descriptions of psychopathologies...”

Most theorists oppose attempts to present postmodernism as a product of the disintegration of modernism. Postmodernism and modernity for them are only mutually complementary types of thinking, like the ideological coexistence of the “harmonious” Apollonian and “destructive” Dionysian principles in the era of antiquity, or Confucianism and Taoism in ancient China. However, in their opinion, only postmodernism is capable of such a pluralistic, all-examining assessment.

“Postmodernism is present there,” writes Wolfgang Welsch, “where a fundamental pluralism of languages ​​is practiced.”

Reviews of the domestic theory of postmodernism are even more polar. Some critics argue that in Russia there is no postmodern literature, much less postmodern theory and criticism. Others claim that Khlebnikov, Bakhtin, Losev, Lotman and Shklovsky are “their own Derrida.” As for the literary practice of Russian postmodernists, according to the latter, Russian literary postmodernism was not only accepted into its ranks by its Western “fathers,” but also refuted the well-known position of Douwe Fokkem that “postmodernism is sociologically limited mainly to the university audience.” . In just over ten years, books by Russian postmodernists have become bestsellers. (For example, V. Sorokin, B. Akunin (the detective genre unfolds not only in the plot, but also in the mind of the reader, first caught in the hook of a stereotype and then forced to part with it)) and other authors.

The world as a text. The theory of postmodernism was created based on the concept of one of the most influential modern philosophers (as well as cultural critic, literary critic, semiotician, linguist) Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, “the world is a text,” “the text is the only possible model of reality.” The second most important theorist of poststructuralism is considered to be the philosopher and cultural scientist Michel Foucault. His position is often seen as a continuation of the Nietzschean line of thought. Thus, history for Foucault is the largest manifestation of human madness, the total chaos of the unconscious.

Other followers of Derrida (they are also like-minded people, opponents, and independent theorists): in France - Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes. In the USA - Yale School (Yale University).

According to the theorists of postmodernism, language, regardless of its scope of application, functions according to its own laws. For example, the American historian Headen White believes that historians who “objectively” restore the past are rather busy finding a genre that could organize the events they describe. In short, the world is comprehended by man only in the form of this or that story, a story about it. Or, in other words, in the form of “literary” discourse (from the Latin discurs - “logical construction”).

Doubt about the reliability of scientific knowledge (by the way, one of the key provisions of physics of the 20th century) led postmodernists to the conviction that the most adequate comprehension of reality is accessible only to intuitive - “poetic thinking” (the expression of M. Heidegger, in fact, far from the theory of postmodernism). The specific vision of the world as chaos, appearing to consciousness only in the form of disordered fragments, was defined as “postmodern sensitivity.”

It is no coincidence that the works of the main theorists of postmodernism are more likely works of art than scientific works, and the worldwide fame of their creators has eclipsed the names of even such serious prose writers from the postmodernist camp as J. Fowles, John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ronald Sukenik, Philip Sollers, Julio Cortazar , Mirorad Pavic.

Metatext. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the American literary critic Frederic Jameson developed the theory of “narrative”, “metatext”. According to Lyotard (The Postmodern Destiny), “postmodernism is to be understood as a distrust of meta-narratives.” “Metatext” (as well as its derivatives: “metanarrative”, “metastory”, “metadiscourse”) is understood by Lyotard as any “explanatory systems” that, in his opinion, organize bourgeois society and serve as a means of self-justification for it: religion, history, science, psychology, art. Describing postmodernism, Lyotard states that it is engaged in a “search for instabilities,” such as the “catastrophe theory” of the French mathematician René Thom, which is directed against the concept of a “stable system.”

If modernism, according to the Dutch critic T. Dan, “was largely justified by the authority of metanarratives, with their help” intending to “find consolation in the face of chaos, nihilism, as it seemed to him,” then the attitude of postmodernists to metanarratives is different They usually resort to it in the form of a parody to prove its impotence and meaninglessness. Thus, R. Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America (1970) parodies E. Hemingway’s myth about the beneficialness of man’s return to virgin nature, T. McGwain in 92 no. shadows - parodies his own code of honor and courage.In the same way, T. Pynchon in the novel V (1963) - W. Faulkner's faith (Absalom, Absalom!) in the possibility of restoring the true meaning of history.

Examples of deconstruction of metatext in modern Russian postmodern literature can be the works of Vladimir Sorokin (Dysmorphomania, Novel), Boris Akunin (The Seagull), Vyacheslav Pietsukh (novel New Moscow Philosophy).

In addition, in the absence of aesthetic criteria, according to the same Lyotard, it turns out to be possible and useful to determine the value of a literary or other work of art by the profit they bring. “Such a reality reconciles all, even the most contradictory trends in art, provided that these trends and needs have purchasing power.” It is not surprising that in the second half of the twentieth century. The Nobel Prize for Literature, which for most writers is a fortune, begins to correlate with the material equivalent of genius.

"Death of the Author", intertext. Literary postmodernism is often called "quotational literature." Thus, Jacques Rivet’s novel-quote Ladies from A. (1979) consists of 750 borrowed passages from 408 authors. Playing with quotes creates so-called intertextuality. According to R. Barth, it “cannot be reduced to the problem of sources and influences; it represents a general field of anonymous formulas, the origin of which can rarely be discovered, unconscious or automatic quotations given without quotation marks.” In other words, it only seems to the author that he himself is creating, but in fact it is the culture itself that is creating through him, using him as its instrument. This idea is by no means new: during the decline of the Roman Empire, literary fashion was set by the so-called centons - various excerpts from famous literary, philosophical, folklore and other works.

In the theory of postmodernism, such literature began to be characterized by the term “death of the author,” introduced by R. Barthes. It means that every reader can rise to the level of the author, receive the legal right to recklessly add to the text and attribute any meanings, including those not remotely intended by its creator. Thus, Milorad Pavich, in the preface to the book Khazar Dictionary, writes that the reader can use it “as it seems convenient to him. Some, as in any dictionary, will look for the name or words that interest them at the moment, others may consider this dictionary a book that should be read in its entirety, from beginning to end, in one sitting...” This invariance is associated with another statement of postmodernists: according to Barthes, writing, including a literary work, is not

Dissolution of character in the novel, new biography. Postmodern literature is characterized by the desire to destroy the literary hero and character in general as a psychologically and socially expressed character. This problem was most fully illuminated by the English writer and literary critic Christina Brooke-Rose in her article The Dissolution of Character in the Novel. literary postmodernism work of art

Brooke-Rose cites five main reasons for the collapse of the “traditional character”: 1) the crisis of the “internal monologue” and other techniques of “mind reading” of the character; 2) the decline of bourgeois society and with it the genre of the novel that this society gave birth to; 3) the emergence of a new “artificial folklore” as a result of the influence of mass media; 4) the growth of the authority of “popular genres” with their aesthetic primitivism, “clip thinking”; 5) the impossibility of conveying the experience of the 20th century by means of realism. with all its horror and madness.

The “new generation” reader, according to Brooke-Rose, increasingly prefers documentary literature or “pure fantasy” to fiction. This is why the postmodern novel and science fiction are so similar to each other: in both genres, the characters are the personification of an idea rather than the embodiment of individuality, the unique personality of a person with “some civic status and a complex social and psychological history.”

Brooke-Rose's overall conclusion is that: “There is no doubt that we are in a state of transition, like the unemployed, awaiting the emergence of a restructured technological society in which there will be a place for them. Realistic novels continue to be written, but fewer and fewer people buy them or believe them, preferring bestsellers with their carefully calibrated flavor of sensitivity and violence, sentimentality and sex, the mundane and the fantastic. Serious writers have shared the fate of the elitist outcast poets and withdrawn into various forms of self-reflection and self-irony - from the fictionalized erudition of Borges to the space comics of Calvino, from Barthes's tormenting Menippaean satires to Pynchon's disorienting symbolic search for who knows what - they all use the technique of the realist novel to prove that can no longer be used for the same purposes. The dissolution of character is a conscious sacrifice postmodernism makes by turning to the technique of science fiction."

The blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction led to the emergence of the so-called “new biographism”, which is already found in many predecessors of postmodernism (from the introspection essays of V. Rozanov to the “black realism” of G. Miller).

A characteristic feature of postmodernism in literature is the recognition of the diversity and diversity of socio-political, ideological, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic values. The aesthetics of postmodernism rejects the principle of the relationship between the artistic image and the realities of reality, which has already become traditional for art. In the postmodern understanding, the objectivity of the real world is questioned, since ideological diversity on the scale of all humanity reveals the relativity of religious faith, ideology, social, moral and legislative norms. From the point of view of a postmodernist, the material of art is not so much reality itself as its images embodied in different types of art. This also explains the postmodern ironic play with images already known (to one degree or another) to the reader, which are called simulacrum(from the French simulacre (similarity, appearance) - an imitation of an image that does not indicate any reality, moreover, indicates its absence).

In the understanding of postmodernists, human history appears as a chaotic heap of accidents, human life turns out to be devoid of any common sense. An obvious consequence of this attitude is that postmodern literature uses the richest arsenal of artistic means that creative practice has accumulated over many centuries in different eras and in different cultures. The quotation of the text, the combination in it of various genres of both mass and elite culture, high vocabulary with low, specific historical realities with the psychology and speech of modern man, borrowing the plots of classical literature - all this, colored by the pathos of irony, and in some cases - self-irony, characteristic features of postmodern writing.

The irony of many postmodernists can be called nostalgic. Their play with various principles of attitude towards reality, known in the artistic practice of the past, is similar to the behavior of a person sorting through old photographs and yearning for what did not come true.

The artistic strategy of postmodernism in art, denying the rationalism of realism with its faith in man and historical progress, also rejects the idea of ​​​​the interdependence of character and circumstances. Refusing the role of an all-explaining prophet or teacher, the postmodernist writer provokes the reader into active co-creation in search of various kinds of motivations for events and the behavior of characters. Unlike a realist author, who is the bearer of truth and evaluates heroes and events from the standpoint of the norm known to him, a postmodernist author does not evaluate anything or anyone, and his “truth” is one of the equal positions in the text.

Conceptually, “postmodernism” is opposed not only to realism, but also to modernist and avant-garde art of the early 20th century. If a person in modernism wondered who he was, then a postmodern person trying to figure out where he is. Unlike the avant-garde artists, postmodernists refuse not only socio-political engagement, but also the creation of new socio-utopian projects. The implementation of any social utopia with the aim of overcoming chaos with harmony, according to postmodernists, will inevitably lead to violence against man and the world. Taking the chaos of life for granted, they try to enter into a constructive dialogue with it.

In Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism as artistic thinking for the first time and independently of foreign literature declared itself in Andrei Bitov’s novel “ Pushkin House"(1964-1971). The novel was banned from publication; the reader became acquainted with it only in the late 1980s, along with other works of “returned” literature. The beginnings of a postmodernist worldview were also revealed in Wen’s poem. Erofeeva " Moscow — Petushki”, written in 1969 and for a long time known only from samizdat, the general reader also became acquainted with it in the late 1980s.

In modern domestic postmodernism in general, two trends can be distinguished: “ tendentious» ( conceptualism, who declared himself as an opposition to official art) and “ untendentious" In conceptualism, the author hides behind various stylistic masks; in works of untendentious postmodernism, on the contrary, the author's myth is cultivated. Conceptualism balances on the line between ideology and art, critically rethinking and destroying (demythologizing) symbols and styles that are significant for the culture of the past (primarily socialist); untendentious postmodern movements are addressed to reality and the human personality; associated with Russian classical literature, they are aimed at new myth-making - the remythologization of cultural debris. Since the mid-1990s, postmodern literature has seen a repetition of techniques, which may be a sign of the self-destruction of the system.

At the end of the 1990s, modernist principles of creating an artistic image were implemented in two stylistic movements: the first goes back to the literature of the “stream of consciousness”, and the second to surrealism.

Book materials used: Literature: textbook. for students avg. prof. textbook institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M.: "Academy", 2010

1. Features of Russian postmodernism. Its representatives

In a broad sense postmodernism- this is a general trend in European culture, which has its own philosophical basis; This is a unique worldview, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a movement in literature and art, expressed in the creation of specific works.

Postmodernism entered the literary scene as a ready-made trend, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and currents: conceptualism and neo-baroque.

Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by Jacques Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is a complete rejection of the old, the creation of a new one at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dispersion of the solid meanings of any phenomenon. The center of any system is a fiction, the authority of power is eliminated, the center depends on various factors.

Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, reality disappears under a stream of simulacra (simulacrum - (from lat. Simulacrum, Idola, Phantasma) -conceptphilosophical discourse introduced in ancient timesthoughts to characterize, along with images-copies of things, such images that are far from similar to things and express the spiritual state, phantasms, chimeras, phantoms, apparitions, hallucinations, dream representations,fears, delirium)(Gilles Deleuze). The world is turning into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, and myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or other people.

In this regard, the concept of intertextuality should also be mentioned, when the created text becomes a fabric of quotes taken from previously written texts, a kind of palimpsest. As a result, an infinite number of associations arise, and the meaning expands indefinitely.

Some works of postmodernism are characterized by a rhizomatic structure (rhizoma is one of the key concepts of the philosophy of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The rhizome must resist the unchanging linear structures (of both being and thinking), which, in their opinion, are typical of classical European culture.), where there are no oppositions , beginning and end.

The basic concepts of postmodernism also include remake and narrative. A remake is a new version of an already written work (cf. Pelevin’s texts). A narrative is a system of ideas about history. History is not a succession of events in their chronological order, but a myth created by the consciousness of people.

So, a postmodern text is an interaction of game languages; it does not imitate life, like a traditional one. In postmodernism, the function of the author also changes: not to create by creating something new, but to recycle the old.

Mark Naumovich Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodernist principle of paralogicality and the concept of “paralogy,” highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western ones. Paralogy is “a contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of rationality as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of the situation of binary, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of one principle, and the possibility of the existence of something opposing it is recognized. The paralogy lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously and interact, but at the same time the existence of a compromise between them is completely excluded. From this point of view, Russian postmodernism differs from Western:

* focusing precisely on the search for compromises and dialogical connections between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a “meeting place” between what is fundamentally incompatible in classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.

* at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally “paralogical”, they retain an explosive nature, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to a contradictory integrity.

The category of simulacra is also somewhat different. Simulacra control people’s behavior, their perception, and ultimately their consciousness, which ultimately leads to the “death of subjectivity”: the human “I” is also made up of a set of simulacra.

The set of simulacra in postmodernism is not opposed to reality, but to its absence, that is, emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become a source of reality only if they are realized as simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of initial disbelief in their reality. The existence of the category of simulacra forces its interaction with reality. Thus, a certain mechanism of aesthetic perception appears, characteristic of Russian postmodernism.

In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are also recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation – Integrity The category of Emptiness also takes on a different direction in Russian postmodernism. For V. Pelevin, emptiness “reflects nothing, and therefore nothing can be destined for it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, so much so that no weapon that enters into confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Thanks to this, Pelevin’s emptiness has ontological supremacy over everything else and is an independent value. Emptiness will always remain Emptiness.

Opposition Personal – Impersonal is realized in practice as a person in the form of a changeable fluid integrity.

Memory - Oblivion- directly from A. Bitov is implemented in the statement on culture: “... in order to preserve, it is necessary to forget.”

Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky brings out another, broader opposition Chaos – Space. “Chaos is a system whose activity is opposite to the indifferent disorder that reigns in a state of equilibrium; no stability any longer ensures the correctness of the macroscopic description, all possibilities are actualized, coexist and interact with each other, and the system turns out to be at the same time everything that it can be.” To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of “Chaosmosis”, which takes the place of harmony.

In Russian postmodernism, there is also a lack of purity of direction - for example, avant-garde utopianism coexists with postmodern skepticism (in the surreal utopia of freedom from Sokolov’s “School for Fools”) and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, be it the “dialectics of the soul” in A. Bitov or “mercy for the fallen” by V. Erofeev and T. Tolstoy.

A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - author - narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their constant affiliation is the archetype of the holy fool. More precisely, the archetype of the holy fool in the text is the center, the point where the main lines converge. Moreover, it can perform two functions (at least):

1. The classic version of a borderline subject, floating between diametrical cultural codes.

2. At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism