Postmodernism in Russian literature of the late XX - early XXI 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 perfect, and in return brought rivers of blood. Hence - the feeling of the crisis of the idea, that is, disbelief in the possibility of any idea to make the world a better place. There was also a crisis of the idea of ​​art. On the other hand, the number of literary works has reached such a quantity that it seems that everything has already been written, each text contains links to previous texts, that is, it is a metatext.

In the course of the development of the literary process, the gap between the 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 has become a reaction to this split, connecting both areas of the multi-layered work. For example, Suskind's "Perfumer" can be read as a detective story, or maybe as a philosophical novel that reveals the issues of genius, 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" has spread thanks to the works of the philosophers Zhe. Derrida, J. Bataille, M. Foucault and especially the book of the French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979).

The principles of repetition and compatibility are transformed into a style of artistic thinking with its inherent features of eclecticism, a tendency to stylization, quoting, rewriting, reminiscences, allusions. The artist does not deal with "pure" material, but with culturally assimilated, because the existence of art in the 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 Currents provides the following list of features of postmodernism:

1. The cult of an independent personality.

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

3. The desire to combine, mutually supplement the truths (sometimes polar opposites) of many people, nations, cultures, religions, philosophies, the 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, anti-naturalness of the way of life prevailing in reality.

5. Deliberately bizarre interweaving of different styles of narration (high classic and sentimental or crudely naturalistic and fabulous, etc.; scientific, journalistic, business styles, etc. are often woven into the artistic style).

6. A mixture of many traditional genre varieties.

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

8. Borrowings, echoes are observed not only at the plot-compositional, but also at the figurative, linguistic levels.

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

10. Irony and parody.

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

Postmodernism develops in the genres of fantastic parables, confessional novels, dystopias, short stories, mythological novels, socio-philosophical and socio-psychological novels, 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. Pavic, M. Kundera, P. Suskind, V. Pelevin, I. Brodsky, F. Begbeder.

In the second half of the XX century. the genre of science fiction is activated, which in its best examples is combined with prognostication (forecasts for the future) and dystopia.

In the pre-war period, existentialism arose, and after the Second World War, existentialism was actively developing. Existentialism (lat. existentiel - existence) is a direction in philosophy and a current 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 secret of being in general. The sources of existentialism were contained in the writings of the German thinker of the 19th century. From Kierkegaard.

Existentialism in works of art reflects the mood of the intelligentsia, disappointed with social and ethical theories. Writers seek to understand the causes of the tragic disorder of human life. The categories of the absurdity of life, fear, despair, loneliness, suffering, death are put forward in the first place. Representatives of this philosophy argued that the only thing that a person has is his inner world, the right to choose, free will.

Existentialism is spreading in French (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre and others), German (E. Nossak, 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 XX century. a “new novel” (“anti-novel”) is developing - a genre equivalent of the French modern novel of the 1940s-1970s, which arises as a denial of existentialism. Representatives of this genre are N. Sarrot, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor, K. Simon and others.

A significant phenomenon of the theatrical avant-garde of the second half of the XX century. is the so-called theater of the absurd. The dramaturgy of this direction is characterized by the absence of a place and time of action, the destruction of the plot and composition, irrationalism, paradoxical collisions, an alloy 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 notable phenomenon in the world process of the second half of the XX 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 life and eternity are organically combined. It acquired the greatest development in Latin American literature (A. Karpent "єp, J. Amado, G. Garcia Marquez, G. Vargas Llosa, M. Asturias, etc.). A special role in the work of these authors is played by the myth, which is the basis of the work. A classic example of magical realism is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by G. Garcia Marquez (1967), where the history of Colombia and all of Latin America is recreated in mythical-real images.

In the second half of the XX century. traditional realism is also developing, which is acquiring new features. The image of individual being is combined with historical analysis, which is due to the desire of artists to understand the logic of social laws (G. Belle, E.-M. Remarque, V. Bykov, N. Dumbadze and others).

Literary process of the second half of the XX century. is determined primarily by the transition from modernism to postmodernism, as well as the powerful development of the intellectual trend, science fiction, "magic realism", avant-garde phenomena, etc.

Postmodernism was widely discussed in the West in the early 1980s. Some researchers consider Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake" (1939) to be the beginning of postmodernism, others - Joyce's preliminary novel "Ulysses", still others - American "new poetry" of the 1940s and 1950s, others think that postmodernism is not a fixed chronological phenomenon, and the spiritual state and “every epoch has its own postmodernism” (Eko), the fifth generally speak of postmodernism as “one of the intellectual fictions of our time” (Yu. Andrukhovych). However, most scholars believe that the transition from modernism to postmodernism took place in the mid-1950s. In the 60s and 70s, postmodernism covered 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 trends as the American school of "black humor" (W. Burroughs, D. Wart, D. Barthelm, D. Donlivy, K. Kesey, K. Vonnegut, D. Heller, etc.), the French "new novel" (A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarrot, M. Butor, K. 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"), 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 Pinchon ("Entropy", "For Sale No. 49" ) and Vladimir Nabokov (English-language novels Pale Fire and others), Argentines Jorge Luis Borges (short stories and essays) and Julio Cortazar (The Hopscotch Game).

An outstanding place in the history of the latest postmodern novel is also occupied by its Slavic representatives, in particular the Czech Milan Kundera and the Serb Milorad Pavić.

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

Postmodernism claims to express the general theoretical "superstructure" of contemporary 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 involves aesthetic pluralism at all levels (plot, composition, figurative, characterological, chronotopic, etc.), completeness of presentation without evaluation, reading the text in a cultural context, co-creation of the reader and the writer, mythological thinking, a combination of historical and timeless categories, dialogue , irony.

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

Total irony reigns in postmodernism, general ridicule and ridicule from all over. Numerous postmodern works of art are characterized by a conscious attitude towards an ironic juxtaposition of various genres, styles, and artistic movements. A work of postmodernism is always a mockery of previous and unacceptable forms of aesthetic experience: realism, modernism, mass culture. Thus, irony defeats 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 trend are characterized by quotation thinking. The American researcher B. Morrissett called postmodern prose "citation literature". The total postmodern quotation comes to replace the elegant modernist reminiscence. Quite postmodern is an American student joke about how a philology student read Hamlet for the first time and was disappointed: nothing special, a collection of common catchwords and expressions. Some works of postmodernism turn into quotation books. So, the novel by the French writer Jacques Rivet "The Young Ladies from A." is a collection of 750 quotations from 408 authors.

Such a concept as intertextuality is also associated with postmodern quotation thinking. The French researcher Julia Kristeva, who introduces this term into literary criticism, noted: “Any text is built as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text.” The French semiotician Roland Karaulov wrote: “Each 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 quotations.” Intertext in the art of postmodernism is the main way of constructing a text and consists in the fact that the text is built from quotations from other texts.

If numerous modernist novels were also intertextual (Ulysses by J. Joyce, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, T. Mann's Doctor Faustus, G. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game) and even realistic works (as Y. Tynyanov proved, Dostoevsky's novel "The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants" is a parody of Gogol and his works), it is 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, at the same time constituting a unity and a multitude of texts. Its example is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each entry refers to other entries in the same edition. You can read such text in an equal way: from one article to another, ignoring hypertext links; read all the articles in a row or moving from one link to another, carrying out "hypertext navigation". Therefore, such a flexible device as hypertext can be manipulated at one's own discretion. In 1976, the American writer Raymond Federman published a novel, which is called “At Your Discretion”. It can be read at the request of the reader, 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 pastish (from Italian pasbiccio - an opera composed of excerpts from other operas, a mixture, potpourri, stylization). It is a specific variant of parody, which changes its functions in postmodernism. Pastish 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. For a day of non-postmodernism, nothing "lives", and even more so nothing is "holy". Pastish is also understood as parody.

Postmodern art is by its nature fragmentary, discrete, eclectic. Hence such a feature of it as a collage. Postmodern collage may seem like a new form of modernist montage, but it differs significantly 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 the postmodern collage, on the contrary, various fragments of the collected objects remain unchanged, not transformed into a single whole, each of them retains its isolation.

Important for postmodernism with the principle of the game. Classical moral and ethical values ​​are transferred to the game 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 plays with them.”

Other characteristics of postmodernism include uncertainty, decanonization, carialization, theatricality, hybridization of genres, co-creation of the reader, saturation with cultural realities, “dissolution of character” (complete destruction of the character as a psychologically and socially determined character), attitude to literature as to 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 images-metaphors of postmodernism are centaur, carnival, labyrinth, library, madness.

A phenomenon of modern literature and culture is also multiculturalism, through which the multi-component American nation has naturally realized the unsteady uncertainty of postmodernism. A more "earthed" multicult) previously "voiced" thousands of equal, unique living American voices of representatives of various racial, ethnic, gender, local and other specific streams. The literature of multiculturalism includes African-American, Indian, Chicano (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 Asians, Europeans, literature of minorities of all stripes .

Literary panorama of the second half of the 1990s. 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 of 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, type of thinking, a way of feeling and thinking, which found its expression in literature.

The claim to the total universality of postmodernism, both in the philosophical and literary spheres, became obvious by the second half of the 1990s, when this aesthetics and the artists representing it, from literary outcasts, turned into the masters of thoughts of the reading public, which had greatly thinned by that time. It was then that Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, who deliberately shocked the reader, were put forward in place of the key figures of modern literature. The shock impression of their works on a person brought up on realistic literature is associated not only with external paraphernalia, a deliberate violation of literary and general cultural speech etiquette (the use of obscene language, the reproduction of jargon of the lowest social environment), the removal of all ethical taboos (a detailed deliberately underestimated image of multiple sexual acts and anti-aesthetic physiological manifestations), the fundamental rejection of a realistic or at least somehow vitally rational motivation for the character or behavior of a character. The shock from the collision with the works of Sorokin or Pelevin was caused by a fundamentally different understanding of the reality reflected in them; the doubt of the authors in the very existence of reality, private and historical time, cultural and socio-historical reality (the 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, development of plot collisions ("Norm" and "Roman" by V. G. Sorokin). Ultimately - a doubt about the possibility of rational explanations of being. All this was often interpreted in the literary-critical periodicals of traditional realistically oriented publications as a mockery of the reader, literature, and man in general. It must be said that the texts of these writers, filled with sexual or faecal motifs, fully gave grounds for such a critical interpretation. However, severe critics unwittingly became victims of writers' provocation, followed the path of the most obvious, simple, and erroneous reading of the postmodernist 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, They are just letters on paper. The writer's statement contains the key not only to his understanding of literature, but also to postmodern consciousness in general.

The bottom line 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 trends, 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 relation 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 typical 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 correlation 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 it is declared so) the study of reality; moreover, the very correlation of literature and life, the connection between them is denied in principle (literature is "this is a dead world", heroes are "just letters on paper"). In this case, the subject of literature is not a genuine social or ontological reality, but the previous culture: literary and non-literary texts of different eras, perceived outside the traditional cultural hierarchy, which makes it possible to mix high and low, sacred and profane, high style and semi-literate vernacular, poetry and slang jargon. Mythology, predominantly socialist realism, incompatible discourses, rethought fates of folklore and literary characters, everyday clichés and stereotypes, most often unreflected, existing at the level of the collective unconscious, become the subject of literature.

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 and aesthetic system or a creative method is prone to deep self-reflection. It develops its own metalanguage, a complex of specific concepts and terms, forms around itself a whole corpus of texts that describe its vocabulary and grammar. In this sense, it appears as a normative aesthetics, in which the work of art itself is preceded by the previously formulated theoretical norms of its poetics.

The theoretical foundations of postmodernism were laid in the 1960s. among French scientists, post-structuralist philosophers. The birth of postmodernism is illuminated by the authority of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Yulia 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 a whole literary movement both in European and Russian literature . Russian postmodernism is a phenomenon quite different from European, but the philosophical basis of postmodernism was created just then, and Russian postmodernism would not have been possible without it, however, like European. That is why, before turning to the history of Russian postmodernity, 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 an 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 the birth of a reader, scripter, intertext And intertextuality. At the heart of postmodern consciousness lies the idea of ​​the fundamental completeness of history, which is manifested in the exhaustion of the creative potentials of human culture, the completeness of its circle of development. Everything that is now has already been and will be, history and culture move in a circle, in essence, are doomed to repetition and marking time. The same thing happens with literature: everything has already been written, it is impossible to create something new, the modern writer is doomed, willy-nilly, to repeating and even quoting the texts of his distant and near predecessors.

It is this attitude of culture that motivates the idea death of the Author. According to theorists of postmodernism, the modern writer is not the author of his books, because everything he can write was written before him, much earlier. He can only quote, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously previous texts. In essence, the modern writer is only a compiler of previously created texts. Therefore, in postmodernist criticism, "The author becomes smaller in stature, like a figure in the very depths of the literary scene." Modern literary texts creates scripter(English - scriptor), fearlessly compiling the texts of previous eras:

"His hand<...>makes a purely descriptive (and not expressive) gesture and outlines a certain sign field that has no starting point - in any case, it comes only from language as such, and it tirelessly casts doubt on any idea of ​​a starting point.

Here we meet with the fundamental presentation 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 have any meaning. It is "a multi-dimensional space where various types of writing combine and argue with each other, none of which is original; the text is woven from quotations referring to thousands of cultural sources", and the writer (i.e. scriptor) "can only imitate forever what has been written before and has not been 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 built as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of absorption and transformation of some other text," wrote Y. Kristeva, substantiating the concept of intertextuality.

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

"The scriptor who replaced the Author does not carry passions, moods, feelings or impressions, but only such an immense dictionary from which he draws his letter, 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 a meaning? Because it is not the author who puts the 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 postmodern worldview is the idea multiple interpretations of the work, each of which has the right to exist. Thus, the figure of the reader, its significance, increases immensely. The reader who puts meaning into the work, as it were, takes the place of the author. The death of an Author is the payment of literature for the birth of a reader.

In essence, other concepts of postmodernism also rely on these theoretical provisions. So, postmodern sensibility implies a total crisis of faith, the perception of the world by modern man as chaos, where all the original semantic and value orientations are absent. intertextuality, suggesting a chaotic combination in the text of codes, signs, symbols of previous texts, leads to a special postmodern form of parody - pastiche expressing total postmodern 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 postmodern attitude to 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 opposite in meaning ( de- destruction and con - creation) denotes duality in relation to the object under study - text, discourse, mythologeme, 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 revealing the internal inconsistency of the text, in discovering in it hidden and unnoticed not only by an inexperienced, "naive" reader, but also by the author himself ("sleeping", in the words of Jacques Derrida) residual meanings inherited from speech, otherwise - discursive practices of the past, enshrined in the language in the form of unconscious mental stereotypes, which, in turn, are transformed just as unconsciously and independently of the author of the text under the influence of the language clichés of the era.

Now it becomes clear that the very period of publishing, which simultaneously brought together different epochs, decades, ideological orientations, cultural preferences, the diaspora and the metropolis, writers who are now living and who have died five to seven decades ago, created the ground for postmodernist sensitivity, impregnated magazine pages with obvious intertextuality. It was under these conditions that the expansion of postmodernist literature of the 1990s became possible.

However, by that time, Russian postmodernism had a certain historical and literary tradition dating back to the 1960s. For 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 Walks with Pushkin (1966-1968), which is considered to be one of the first works of Russian postmodernism, was written in prison and sent to freedom under the guise of letters to his wife. A novel by Andrey Bitov "Pushkin House"(1971) stood on a par with the book of Abram Tertz. These works were brought together by a common subject of the image - Russian classical literature and mythologemes, generated by more than a century 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, overt or covert citation of classical texts, fragments of the works of Lenin and Marx memorized at school with the situation experienced by the narrator in a commuter train in a state of severe intoxication, he achieved both the effect of pastiche and the intertextual richness of the work, possessing a truly limitless semantic inexhaustibility, suggesting a plurality of interpretations. However, the poem "Moscow - Petushki" showed that Russian postmodernism is not always correlated with the canon of a similar Western trend. Erofeev fundamentally rejected the concept of the death of the Author. It was the view of the author-narrator that formed in the poem a single point of view on the world, and the state of intoxication, as it were, sanctioned the complete absence of the cultural hierarchy of the semantic layers included in it.

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

The essence of conceptualism was conceived as a radical change in the subject of aesthetic activity: an orientation not to the image of reality, but to the knowledge of language in its metamorphoses. At the same time, speech and mental clichés of the Soviet era turned out to be the object of poetic deconstruction. It was an aesthetic reaction to the late, dead and ossified socialist realism with its worn out formulas and ideologemes, slogans, and propaganda texts that made no sense. 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.

With particular obviousness, the strategy of conceptualism manifested itself in the creative practice Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov(1940–2007), the creator of many myths (including the myth about himself as a modern Pushkin), parodying Soviet ideas about the world, literature, everyday life, love, the relationship between man and power, etc. In his work, Soviet ideologemes about Great Labor, omnipotent Power (the image of Militsaner) were transformed and postmodernistically profaned. Mask-images in Prigov's poems, "the flickering sensation of the presence - absence of the author in the text" (L. S. Rubinshtein) turned out to be a manifestation of the concept of the Author's death. Parodic citations, the removal of the traditional opposition of the ironic and the serious determined the presence of postmodern pastiche in poetry and, as it were, reproduced the categories of the mentality of the Soviet "little man". In the poems "Here the cranes fly with a strip of scarlet ...", "I found a number on my counter ...", "Here I will fry a chicken ..." they conveyed the psychological complexes of the hero, discovered 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: "philosophers", "pseudo-verses", "pseudo-obituary", "opus", etc.

In creativity Lev Semenovich Rubinstein(b. 1947) a "harder version of conceptualism" was realized (M. N. Epshtein). He wrote his poems on separate cards, while an important element of his work became performance - presentation of poems, their author's performance. Holding and sorting through the cards on which the word was written, only one poetic line, nothing was written, he, as it were, emphasized the new principle of poetics - the poetics of "catalogs", poetic "card files". 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, leveling any speech gesture - from a detailed theoretical message to an interjection, from a stage direction to a fragment of a telephone conversation. A pack of cards is an object, a volume, it is NOT a book , this is the brainchild of the “extra-Gutenberg” existence of verbal culture.

A special place among conceptualists is occupied by Timur Yurievich Kibirov(b. 1955). Using the technical methods of conceptualism, he comes to a different interpretation of the Soviet past than that of his senior comrades in the shop. We can talk about a kind critical sentimentalism Kibirov, which manifested itself 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 subjected 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, one cannot speak of the death of the Author: the activity of the author "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 this ("Draft answer to Gugolev").

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

"All his works - diverse thematically and genre - are built, in essence, on the same technique. I would designate 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 the conceptual literature<...>The language of his works<...>as if he goes crazy and begins to behave inappropriately, which in fact is the adequacy of a different order. It is as lawless as it is lawful."

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

"Most often, his stories are built according to the same scheme. At the beginning, there is an ordinary, slightly overly juicy parodic Sotsart text: a story about a hunt, a Komsomol meeting, a meeting of the party committee - but suddenly it happens completely unexpectedly and unmotivated<...>a breakthrough into something terrible and terrible, which, according to Sorokin, is real reality. As if Pinocchio pierced a canvas with a painted hearth 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 to write actively 10 years earlier. In the mid-1990s, the main works of the writer, 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 Fat" (1999) gets quite scandalous fame. In 2001, a collection of new short stories "Feast" was published, and in 2002 - the novel "Ice", where the author allegedly breaks with conceptualism. Sorokin's most representative books are Roman and Feast.

POSTMODERNISM IN LITERATURE - a literary trend 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, decenteredness of the modern world; the "spirit of literature" of the late 20th century; literature of the era of world wars, the scientific and technological revolution and the information "explosion".

The term postmodernism is often used to characterize the literature of the late 20th century. Translated from German, postmodernism means "what follows after modernity." As often happens with the "invented" in the 20th century. prefix "post" (post-impressionism, post-expressionism), the term postmodernism indicates both opposition to modernity and its continuity. Thus, already in the very concept of postmodernism, the duality (ambivalence) of the time that gave rise to it was reflected. Ambiguous, often directly opposite, are the assessments of postmodernism by its researchers and critics.

Thus, in the works of some Western researchers, the culture of postmodernism was called "weakly connected culture". (R. Merelman). T. Adorno characterizes it as a culture that reduces the capacity of a person. I. Berlin - like a twisted tree of humanity. According to the American writer John Bart, postmodernism is an artistic practice that sucks juices from the culture of the past, a literature of exhaustion.

Postmodern literature, from the point of view of Ihab Hassan (Dismemberment of Orpheus), in fact, is anti-literature, as 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 space into chaos .

According to Ilya Kolyazhny, the characteristic features of Russian literary postmodernism are "a mocking attitude towards one's past", "the desire to reach in one's homegrown cynicism and self-abasement to the extreme, to the last limit." According to the same author, "the meaning of their (i.e., postmodernists) creativity usually comes down to 'joke' and 'banter', and as literary devices, 'special effects', they use profanity and a frank description of psychopathologies ...".

Most theorists oppose attempts to present postmodernism as a product of the decay of modernism. Postmodernism and modernity for them are only mutually complementary types of thinking, similar to the worldview 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-trying assessment.

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

Reviews about the domestic theory of postmodernism are even more polar. Some critics argue that in Russia there is neither postmodern literature, nor, moreover, postmodern theory and criticism. Others claim that Khlebnikov, Bakhtin, Losev, Lotman and Shklovsky are "Derrida themselves." 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 Douwe Fokkem's well-known position that "postmodernism is sociologically limited mainly to university audiences" . For a little over ten years, the books of 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 on the hook of a stereotype, and then forced to part with it)) and other authors.

World as text. The theory of postmodernism was created on the basis of the concept of one of the most influential modern philosophers (as well as a culturologist, literary critic, semiotician, linguist) Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, "the world is a text", "text is the only possible model of reality". The second most important theorist of post-structuralism is considered to be the philosopher, culturologist 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 lawlessness of the unconscious.

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

According to the theorists of postmodernism, language, regardless of the scope of its application, functions according to its own laws. For example, the American historian Heden White believes that historians who “objectively” restore the past are rather busy finding a genre that could streamline the events they describe. In short, the world is comprehended by a person only in the form of this or that story, a story about it. Or, in other words, in the form of a "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 available only to intuitive - "poetic thinking" (M. Heidegger's expression, in fact, far from the theory of postmodernism). The specific vision of the world as chaos, which appears to consciousness only in the form of disordered fragments, has received the definition of "postmodern sensitivity".

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

Metatext. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard and the American literary critic Frederic Jameson developed the theory of "narrative", "metatext". According to Lyotard (Postmodernist Destiny), "postmodernism should be understood as distrust of metanarratives." "Metatext" (as well as its derivatives: "metanarrative", "metaraskazka", "metadiscourse") Lyotard understands 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 claims that he is engaged in "search for instabilities", such as the "catastrophe theory" of the French mathematician René Thom, directed against the concept of "stable system".

If modernism, according to the Dutch critic T. Dana, “was largely substantiated by the authority of metanarratives, with their help” intending to “find consolation in the face of chaos, nihilism, which, as it seemed to him, had erupted ...”, then the attitude of postmodernists to metanarratives is different. They resort to it as a rule in the form of a parody to prove its impotence and senselessness.So R. Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America (1970) parodies the myth of E. Hemingway about the beneficial nature of the return of man to virgin nature, T. McGwaine 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 belief (Absalom, Absalom!) in the possibility of restoring the true meaning of history.

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

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 that they bring. "Such a reality reconciles all, even the most controversial trends in art, provided that these trends and needs have purchasing power." Not surprisingly, in the second half of the twentieth century. The Nobel Prize in Literature, which for most writers is a fortune, is beginning to be correlated with the material equivalent of genius.

"Death of the Author", intertext. Literary postmodernism is often referred to as "citation literature". Thus, Jacques Rivet's quotation novel Young lady from A. (1979) consists of 750 borrowed passages from 408 authors. Playing with quotes creates the so-called intertextuality. According to R. Barth, it “cannot be reduced to the problem of sources and influences; it is a common field of anonymous formulas, the origin of which is rarely found, unconscious or automatic quotations given without quotation marks. In other words, it only seems to the author that he himself creates, but in fact it is culture itself that creates through him, using him as its tool. This idea is by no means new: during the decline of the Roman Empire, the 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. Barth. It means that each reader can rise to the level of the author, get the legal right to recklessly compose and attribute any meanings to the text, including those not remotely intended by its creator. So Milorad Pavic in the preface to the book The 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 word that interests 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 ... ". Such invariance is connected with another statement of postmodernists: according to Barthes, writing, including a literary work, is not

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

Brooke-Rose cites five main reasons for the collapse of "traditional character": 1) the crisis of "inner monologue" and other "mind-reading" character techniques; 2) the decline of bourgeois society and with it the genre of the novel that this society gave rise to; 3) coming to the fore of the new "artificial folklore" as a result of the influence of the 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 reader of the "new generation", according to Brooke-Rose, increasingly prefers nonfiction 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 more the personification of an idea than the embodiment of individuality, the unique personality of a person with “some kind of civil status and a complex social and psychological history.”

Brook-Rose's overall conclusion is: “Undoubtedly, we are in a state of transition, like the unemployed, waiting for a restructured technological society to emerge where they can find a place. Realistic novels continue to be made, but fewer and fewer people buy or believe in them, preferring bestsellers with their finely tuned seasoning of sensibility and violence, sentimentality and sex, mundane and fantastic. Serious writers have shared the fate of elitist outcast poets and locked themselves in various forms of self-reflection and self-irony - from the fictionalized erudition of Borges to Calvino's cosmic comics, from Barthes's anguished Menippean satires to Pynchon's disorienting symbolic quest for who knows what - all of which use the technique of the realistic novel to prove that she can no longer be used for the same purposes. The dissolution of character is the conscious sacrifice that postmodernism makes by turning to the technique of science fiction.

The blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction has led to the emergence of the so-called "new biographism", which is already found in many predecessors of postmodernism (from the self-observation 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 the worldview diversity on the scale of all mankind 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, but rather its images embodied in different types of art. This is also the reason for the postmodernist ironic game with images already known (to one degree or another) to the reader, called simulacrum(from the French simulacre (likeness, appearance) - an imitation of an image that does not denote any reality, moreover, indicates its absence).

In the understanding of postmodernists, the history of mankind 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 the literature of postmodernism uses the richest arsenal of artistic means that creative practice has accumulated over many centuries in different eras and in different cultures. The citation of the text, the combination in it of various genres of both mass and elite culture, high vocabulary with low, concrete historical realities with the psychology and speech of modern man, borrowing plots from classical literature - all this is colored by the pathos of irony, and in some cases - and self-irony, characteristic signs of postmodern writing.

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

The artistic strategy of postmodernism in art, denying the rationalism of realism with its belief in man and historical progress, also rejects the idea of ​​the interdependence of character and circumstances. Refusing the role of a prophet or teacher explaining everything, the postmodernist writer provokes the reader to active co-creation in search of various kinds of motivations for events and behavior of characters. Unlike the realist author, who is the bearer of truth and evaluates the characters and events from the standpoint of the norm known to him, the postmodernist author evaluates nothing and no one, and his “truth” is one of the equal positions in the text.

Conceptually, "postmodernism" is opposed not only to realism, but also to the modernist and avant-garde art of the early 20th century. If a person in modernism wondered who he is, then a postmodernist person trying to figure out where he is. In contrast to the avant-gardists, postmodernists refuse not only from the socio-political engagement, but also from the creation of new socio-utopian projects. The implementation of any social utopia in order to overcome chaos by 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 the novel by Andrey Bitov " Pushkin House"(1964-1971). The novel was banned for publication, the reader got acquainted with it only in the late 1980s, along with other works of "returned" literature. The beginnings of a postmodern worldview were also found in Wen's poem. Erofeev " Moscow — Petushki”, written in 1969 and for a long time known only through samizdat, the general reader also met her 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 the works of unbiased postmodernism, on the contrary, the author's myth is cultivated. Conceptualism balances on the verge between ideology and art, critically rethinking and destroying (demythologizing) symbols and styles significant for the culture of the past (primarily socialist); untendentious postmodern currents are turned to reality and to the human person; associated with Russian classical literature, they are aimed at a new myth-making - the remythologization of cultural fragments. Since the mid-1990s, postmodernist literature has been marked by a repetition of techniques, which may be a sign of the system's self-destruction.

In the late 1990s, the modernist principles of creating an artistic image are implemented in two stylistic currents: the first goes back to the literature of the "stream of consciousness", and the second - to surrealism.

Used book materials: Literature: uch. for stud. 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 base; it is a peculiar attitude, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a trend 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 the complete rejection of the old, the creation of the new at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dissipation 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 ancientthoughts to characterize, along with images-copies of things, images that are far from similar to things and express spiritual state, phantasms, chimeras, phantoms, ghosts, hallucinations, dream representations,fears, delirium)(Gilles Deleuze). The world turns into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or by other people.

In this regard, we should also mention the concept of intertextuality, when the created text becomes a fabric of quotations taken from previously written texts, a kind of palimpsest. As a result, an infinite number of associations arise, and the meaning expands to infinity.

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

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

So, the postmodern text is the interaction of the languages ​​of the game, it does not imitate life, as the traditional one does. 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 postmodern principle of paralogy and the concept of “paralogy”, highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western. Paralogy is “contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of intelligence as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of a binary situation, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of some one beginning, moreover, the possibility of the existence of an opposing one is recognized. The paralogic lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously, 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 just on the search for compromises and dialogic interfaces between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a "meeting point" between 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 character, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to contradictory integrity.

The category of simulacra is 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 opposed not to reality, but to its absence, that is, to emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become a source of reality generation only under the condition of realizing their simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of the 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, which is characteristic of Russian postmodernism.

In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation - Integrity The category of Emptiness also acquires a different direction in Russian postmodernism. According to V. Pelevin, emptiness “does not reflect anything, and therefore nothing can be destined on it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, and so much so that no tool that has entered into a confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Due 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 realized in the provision on culture: "... in order to save - it is necessary to forget."

Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky deduces another, broader one - the 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 all that it can be. To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of "Chaosmos", which takes the place of harmony.

In Russian postmodernism, there is also a lack of purity of direction - for example, avant-garde utopianism (in the surrealistic utopia of freedom from Sokolov's "School for Fools") and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, whether it is "dialectic of the soul" by A. Bitov, coexist with postmodern skepticism. or "mercy to the fallen" by V. Erofeev and T. Tolstoy.

A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - the author - the narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their permanent 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 the border subject, floating between the 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