In a broad sense postmodernism- This is a general trend in European culture, which has its own philosophical base; this is a kind of worldview, 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 direction, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and trends: conceptualism and neo-baroque.
Conceptualism or Sots Art.
Conceptualism, or sots art- this trend is consistently expanding the postmodern picture of the world, involving more and more new cultural languages (from socialist realism to various classical trends, etc.). Weaving and juxtaposing authoritative languages with marginal ones (obscenities, for example), sacred with profane, semi-official with rebellious, conceptualism exposes the proximity of various myths of cultural consciousness, equally destroying reality, replacing it with a set of fictions and at the same time, totalitarianly imposing their view of the world on the reader. truth, ideal. Conceptualism is predominantly focused on rethinking the languages of power (be it the language of political power, that is, socialist realism, or the language of a moral and authoritative tradition - for example, Russian classics, or various mythologies of history).
Conceptualism in literature is represented primarily by such authors as D.A.Pigorov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, and in a transformed form - by Evgeny Popov, Anatoly Gavrilov, Zufar Gareev, Nikolai Baytov, Igor Yarkevich and others.
Postmodernism is a trend that can be defined as neo-baroque... The Italian theorist Omar Calabrese in his book "Neo-Baroque" highlighted the main features of this movement:
repetition aesthetics: dialectics of the unique and repeatable - polycentrism, regulated irregularity, torn rhythm (thematically played in "Moscow-Petushki" and "Pushkin House", on these principles the poetical systems of Rubinstein and Kibirov are also built);
excess aesthetics- experiments on the extensibility of boundaries to the last limits, monstrousness (corporeality of Aksenov, Aleshkovsky, monstrous characters and, above all, the narrator in Sasha Sokolov's "Palisandria");
shift of emphasis from the whole to the detail and / or fragment: redundancy of parts, "in which the part actually becomes a system" (Sokolov, Tolstaya);
randomness, discontinuity, irregularity as the dominant compositional principles combining unequal and dissimilar texts into a single methotext ("Moscow-Petushki" by Erofeev, "School for Fools" and "Between a Dog and a Wolf" by Sokolov, "Pushkin House" by Bitov, "Chapaev and Emptiness" by Pelevin, etc.).
insolubility of collisions(which in turn form a system of "knots" and "labyrinths"): the pleasure of resolving conflicts, plot collisions, etc. is replaced by the "taste of loss and mystery."
The emergence of postmodernism.
Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by J. Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is a 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 the flow of simulacra (Deleuze). The world turns into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, myths. Man lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or by other people.
In this regard, the concept of intertextuality should also be mentioned, 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, where there are no oppositions, beginning and end.
The basic concepts of postmodernism also include a remake and a narrative. A remake is a new version of an already written work (compare: texts by Furmanov and Pelevin). A 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, like the traditional one. In postmodernism, the author's function also changes: not to create, creating something new, but to recycle the old.
M. Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodern principle of paralogism and on the concept of “paralogy”, highlights some of the features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with the West. Paralogy is "a contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of intelligence as such." Paralogy creates a situation opposite to the situation of binarity, that is, one in which there is a tough opposition with the priority of some one principle, moreover, the possibility of the existence of an opposing principle is recognized. The paralogicality 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 the West:
the focus is precisely on the search for compromises and dialogical conjugations between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a "meeting place" between the fundamentally incompatible in the classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.
at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally "paralogical", they remain explosive, unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but generate contradictory integrity.
The category of simulacra is also somewhat different. Simulacres control the behavior of people, their perception, ultimately, their consciousness, which ultimately leads to the "death of subjectivity": the human "I" is also made up of the totality of simulacra.
The set of simulacra in postmodernism is not the opposite of reality, but its absence, that is, emptiness. At the same time, in a paradoxical way, simulacra become a source of reality generation only if they are realized as simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only on 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, which is characteristic of Russian postmodernism.
In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are also recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragment - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Fragmentation - Integrity according to M. Lipovetsky's definition: "... even the most radical variants of the decomposition of integrity in the texts of Russian postmodernism are devoid of independent meaning and are presented as mechanisms for generating certain" non-classical "models of integrity."
The category of Emptiness is also acquiring a different direction in Russian postmodernism. V. Pelevin's emptiness "does not reflect anything, and therefore nothing can be predestined on it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, and so much so that no weapon that has entered into 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 by A. Bitov it is realized in the position on culture: “… in order to preserve - it is necessary to forget”.
Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky deduces 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 the possibilities are actualized, coexist and interact with each other, and the system turns out at the same time to be everything that it can be ”. To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of "Chaosmos", which takes the place of harmony.
In Russian postmodernism, the lack of purity of the direction is also noted - for example, avant-garde utopianism (in the surrealist utopia of freedom from Sokolov's School for Fools) and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, be it Bitov's “dialectic of the soul” 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 constant belonging 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 (according to at least):
The classic version of the frontier subject, floating between diametrical cultural codes. So, for example, Venichka in the poem "Moscow - Petushki" is trying, being on the other side, to reunite in himself Yesenin, Jesus Christ, fantastic cocktails, love, tenderness, the editorial of "Pravda". And this turns out to be possible only within the limits of the foolish consciousness. Sasha Sokolov's hero from time to time divides in half, also standing in the center of cultural codes, but without stopping at any of them, but as if passing their stream through himself. This closely corresponds to the theory of postmodernism about the existence of the Other. It is thanks to the existence of the Other (or Others), in other words, society, in the mind of a person, in it all kinds of cultural codes intersect, forming an unpredictable mosaic.
At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a link with a powerful branch of the cultural archaic, stretching from Rozanov and Kharms to modern times.
Russian postmodernism also has several options for the saturation of the artistic space. Here is some of them.
For example, a work can be based on the rich state of culture, which in many respects substantiates the content (“Pushkin House” by A. Bitov, “Moscow - Petushki” by V. Erofeev). There is another version of postmodernism: the saturated state of culture is replaced by endless emotions for any reason. The reader is offered an encyclopedia of emotions and philosophical conversations about everything in the world, and especially about the post-Soviet confusion, perceived as a terrible black reality, as a complete failure, a dead end (“Endless dead end” by D. Galkovsky, works by V. Sorokin).
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 that goes back at least four decades. Its appearance was completely natural and was conditioned both by the internal laws of literary development and by a certain stage of social consciousness. Postmodernism is not so much aesthetics as philosophy, the type of thinking, the manner of feeling and thinking, which has found its expression in literature.
The claim to the total universality of postmodernism both in the philosophical and literary spheres became apparent by the second half of the 1990s, when this aesthetics and the artists representing it, from literary marginalized, turned into the masters of the thoughts of the reading public, which had greatly thinned out by that time. It was then that in place of the key figures modern literature Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin are nominated, deliberately shocking the reader. The shock impression of a person brought up on realistic literature from their works is associated not only with external attributes, a deliberate violation of literary and general cultural speech etiquette (the use of foul language, reproduction of the jargon of the lowest social environment), the removal of all ethical taboos (a detailed deliberately understated image of multiple sexual intercourse and anti-aesthetic physiological manifestations), a fundamental rejection of realistic or at least somehow vitally rationally conditioned motivation of the character or behavior of the 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 than before; the authors' doubts about 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, the motivation of the characters' actions, the development of plot collisions ("Norma" and "Novel" by VG Sorokin). Ultimately - a doubt about the possibility of a rational explanation 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 fecal motives, provided grounds for such a critical interpretation. However, severe critics unwittingly became victims of writer's provocation, 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 a story are" not people, they are just letters on paper. "
The bottom line is that, in its aesthetic basis, the literature of postmodernism is not just sharply opposed to the realistic - it has a fundamentally different artistic nature. Traditional literary movements, which include classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism and, of course, realism, are in one way or another oriented towards 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), explore reality, study it from the point of view of socio-historical processes, which is characteristic of classical realism, 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 itself the task (at least, so it is declared) the study of reality; moreover, the very correlation of 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 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 the high and the low, sacred and profane, high style and semi-literate vernacular, poetry and thug jargon. The subject of literature is mythology, predominantly socialist realist, incompatible discourses, rethought 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, randomly, bizarrely and haphazardly mixing and rethinking them. Postmodernism as a literary aesthetic system or a creative method tends to be deeply self-reflection. He develops his own metalanguage, a complex of specific concepts and terms, forms around himself a whole body of texts describing his vocabulary and grammar. In this sense, it appears as a normative aesthetics, in which, in fact, fiction preceded by the previously formulated theoretical norms of his poetics.
The theoretical foundations of postmodernism were laid in the 1960s. among French scientists, post-structuralist philosophers. The birth of postmodernism was illuminated by the authority of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jean François 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 trend in both European and Russian literature ... Russian postmodernism is a completely different phenomenon from European, however, the philosophical basis of postmodernism was created precisely then, and Russian postmodernism would have been impossible without it, however, like European. 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. Barthes "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 postmodern consciousness is based on 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 development circle. Everything that is now has already been and still will be, history and culture move in a circle, in essence, are doomed to repeat and stamp on the spot. The same happens with literature: everything has already been written, it is impossible to create a new one, modern writer Willy-nilly, he 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, the modern writer is not the author of his books, because everything that he can write was written before him, much earlier. He can only quote, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously, the previous texts. In essence, the modern writer is only a compiler of previously created texts. Therefore, in postmodern criticism, "The author becomes shorter, like a figurine in the very depths of the literary scene." Contemporary literary texts creates scriptwriter(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 does not have a starting point - in any case, it comes only from the language as such, and he tirelessly casts doubt on any idea of the starting point. "
Here we encounter a fundamental view of postmodern criticism. The death of the Author casts doubt on the very content of the text, saturated with the author's meaning. It turns out that the text cannot initially have any meaning. This is a "multidimensional space where they combine and argue with each other. different kinds letters, none of which is original; the text is woven from quotations referring to thousands of cultural sources, "and the writer (ie the scriptor)" can only imitate forever what has been 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, how 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, loses its original meaning, if it ever possessed it, enters into new semantic connections with each other, which can only be unraveled reader. A similar ideology characterized the French poststructuralists in general:
"The scriptor who replaced the Author carries not passions, moods, feelings or impressions, but only such an immense vocabulary from which he draws his letter, which does not know stopping; life only imitates the book, and the book itself is woven of signs, itself imitates something already forgotten, and so on ad infinitum. "
But why, reading a work, we are convinced that it still has meaning? Because it's not the author who puts the meaning in 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 the plurality of 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 in the work, as it were, takes the place of the author. The death of the Author is the payment of literature for the birth of the reader.
In essence, other concepts of postmodernism are based on these theoretical propositions. So, postmodern sensibility presupposes a total crisis of faith, the feeling of a modern man of the world as chaos, where all the primordial semantic and value orientations are absent. Intertextuality, assuming a chaotic combination in the text of codes, signs, symbols of previous texts, leads to a special postmodern form of parody - graze, expressing a 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 simulation of reality, not related to 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 the previous culture is its deconstruction. This concept is traditionally associated with the name of J. Derrida. The term itself, which includes two opposite prefixes ( de- destruction and con - creation) denotes a duality in relation to the object under study - text, discourse, mythologeme, any concept of the collective subconscious. The deconstruction operation 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", according to 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 just as unconsciously and independently of the author of the text transformed under the influence of the linguistic clichés of the era. "
Now it becomes clear that the very period of publishing, which has collided simultaneously different epochs, decades, ideological orientations, cultural preferences, the diaspora and the metropolis, writers who now live and have passed away five to seven decades ago, has created the basis for postmodern sensibility, has saturated the magazine pages with obvious intertextuality. It was in these conditions that the expansion of postmodern 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, the book by Abram Tertz "Walks with Pushkin" (1966-1968), which is considered to be one of the first works of Russian postmodernism, was written in prison and sent free under the guise of letters to his wife. Andrey Bitov's novel "Pushkin House"(1971) stood on a par with the book of Abram Tertz. These works were brought together by the 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 the Soviet alcoholic, Erofeev seemed to follow the path of classical postmodernism. Combining the ancient tradition of Russian foolishness, explicit or implicit quotation of classical texts, fragments of the works of Lenin and Marx memorized at school with the situation of a trip in a commuter train experienced by the author-narrator in a state of severe intoxication, he achieved both the pastisha effect and the intertextual richness of the work, possessing a truly limitless semantic inexhaustibility, which presupposes a plurality of interpretations. However, the poem "Moscow - Petushki" showed that Russian postmodernism is not always correlated with the canon of a similar western direction. 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 unified 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 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 Rubinstein, 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 towards the depiction of reality, but towards the knowledge of language in its metamorphoses. In this case, the object of poetic deconstruction turned out to be the speech and mental clichés of the Soviet era. It was an aesthetic reaction to the late, moribund and ossified socialist realism with its worn out formulas and ideologems, slogans, propaganda texts that had become meaningless. They were thought of as concepts, which were deconstructed by conceptualists. The author's "I" was absent, it was dissolved in "quotes", "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 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 the Militianer) were transformed and postmodernist profanities. The images-masks in Prigov's poems, "the flickering sensation of presence - the absence of the author in the text" (L. 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 the ironic and the serious conditioned the presence of postmodernist pastiche in a hundred poetry and, as it were, reproduced the categories of the Soviet mentality " little man". In the poems" Here the cranes are flying like a strip of scarlet ... "," I found a figure on my counter ... "," Here I will fry a chicken ... " accompanied by the creation of quasi-genres of Prigov's poetry: "philosophies", "pseudo-poetry", "pseudo-necrologue", "opus", etc.
In creativity Lev Semenovich Rubinstein(b. 1947) "a tougher version of conceptualism" was realized (Μ. 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 line of poetry, nothing was written, he seemed to emphasize the new principle of poetics - the poetics of "catalogs", poetic "card indexes". The card became the elementary unit of the text, connecting poetry and prose.
“Each card,” the poet said, “is both an object and a universal unit of rhythm that evens out any speech gesture - from a detailed theoretical message to an interjection, from a stage remark to a snippet of a telephone conversation. A pack of cards is an object, volume, it is NOT a book. , this is the brainchild of the "extra-Guttenberg" existence of verbal culture. "
A special place among conceptualists is occupied by Timur Yurievich Kibirov(p. 1955). Using the techniques of conceptualism, he arrives at a different interpretation of the Soviet past than his older comrades in the shop. We can talk about a peculiar critical sentimentalism Kibirov, manifested in such poems as "To the Artist Semyon Faibisovich", "Just utter the word" Russia "...", "Twenty sonnets to Sasha Zapoyeva". Traditional poetic themes and genres are not at all subjected to total and destructive deconstruction by the Kibirovs. For example, the theme of poetic creativity is developed by him in poems - friendly messages "L. S. Rubinstein", "Love, Komsomol and Spring. D. A. Prigov" and others. "manifests itself in a kind of lyricism of Kibirov's poems and poems, in their tragicomic coloration. His poetry embodied the worldview of a person at the end of history, who is in a situation of cultural vacuum and suffers from this ("Draft of an answer to Gugolev").
The central figure of modern Russian postmodernism can be considered Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin(p. 1955). The beginning of his work, which took place in the mid-1980s, firmly connects the writer with conceptualism. He did not lose this connection in his subsequent works, although modern stage his work is, of course, broader than the conceptual 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. Rubinshtein very accurately described Sorokin's creative strategy:
"All his works - various thematically and genre - are essentially built on one technique. I would describe this technique as“ style hysteria. ”Sorokin does not deal with the description of 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 in fact is the adequacy of a different order. It is as lawless as it is lawful. "
Indeed, the strategy of Vladimir Sorokin consists in a merciless 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 Soszart text: a story about a hunt, a Komsomol meeting, a meeting of the party committee - but suddenly, completely unexpectedly and without motivation, it happens<...>a breakthrough into something terrible and terrible, which is, according to Sorokin, the real reality. As if Pinocchio pierced the canvas with the painted hearth with his nose, but found there not a door, but approximately what is shown in modern horror films. "
VG Sorokin's texts in Russia began to be published 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 Thirty Love" (1995). In 1994 Sorokin wrote the story "Hearts of Four" and the novel "Roman". His novel "Blue Lard" (1999) is getting scandalous notoriety. In 2001 a collection of new stories "The 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.
Ilyin I.P. Postmodernism: Words, Terms. M., 2001.S. 56.The movement, called postmodernism, emerged at the end of the 20th century and combined the philosophical, worldview and cultural sentiments of its time. There was also art, religion, philosophy. Postmodernism, not striving to study the deep problems of being, tends to simplicity, a superficial reflection of the world. Therefore, the literature of postmodernism is aimed not at understanding the world, but accepting it as it is.
Postmodernism in Russia
The forerunners of postmodernism were modernism and avant-garde, which sought to revive the traditions of the Silver Age. Russian postmodernism in literature has abandoned the mythologization of reality, to which the previous literary trends gravitated. But at the same time, he creates his own mythology, resorting to it as the most understandable cultural language. Postmodernist writers conducted a dialogue with chaos in their works, presenting it as a real model of life, where the harmony of the world is a utopia. At the same time, a search for a compromise was going on between space and chaos.
Russian postmodern writers
The ideas considered by various authors in their works sometimes represent strange unstable hybrids designed to conflict forever, being absolutely incompatible concepts. So, in the books of V. Erofeev, A. Bitov and S. Sokolov compromises are presented, paradoxical in essence, between life and death. T. Tolstoy and V. Pelevin - between fantasy and reality, and Petsukh - between law and absurdity. The fact that postmodernism in Russian literature is based on combinations of opposing concepts: the sublime and the base, pathos and mockery, fragmentation and integrity, oxymoron becomes its main principle.
Among the postmodernist writers, in addition to those already listed, include S. Dovlatov, L. Petrushevskaya, V. Aksyonova. In their works, one can observe the main characteristic features of postmodernism, such as understanding art as a way of organizing text according to special rules; an attempt to convey a vision of the world through organized chaos on the pages of a literary work; gravitation towards parody and denial of authority; emphasizing the conventionality of artistic and visual techniques used in works; connection within one text of different literary eras and genres. The ideas that postmodernism proclaimed in literature indicate its continuity with modernism, which in turn called for a departure from civilization and a return to savagery, which leads to the highest point of involution - chaos. But in specific literary works you cannot see only the desire for destruction, there is always a creative tendency. They can manifest themselves in different ways, one prevail over the other. For example, Vladimir Sorokin's works are dominated by the desire for destruction.
Having formed in Russia in the period of the 80-90s, postmodernism in literature has absorbed the collapse of ideals and the desire to escape from the orderliness of the world, therefore, a mosaic and fragmented consciousness arose. Each author refracted this in his own way in his work. L. Petrushevskaya's works combine a craving for naturalistic nudity in describing reality and a striving to get out of it into the realm of the mystical. The feeling of peace in the post-Soviet era was characterized precisely as chaotic. Often in the center of the plot of postmodernists is the act of creativity, and the main character is the writer. It is not so much the character's relationship with real life how much with text. This is observed in the works of A. Bitov, Yu. Buida, S. Sokolov. There is an effect of literature's isolation on itself, when the world is perceived as a text. The main character, often identified with the author, when faced with reality, pays a terrible price for its imperfection.
It can be predicted that, being oriented towards destruction and chaos, postmodernism in literature will one day leave the stage and give way to another trend aimed at a systemic worldview. Because sooner or later the state of chaos gives way to order.
The postmodern trend in literature was born in the second half of the 20th century. Translated from Latin and French, "postmodern" means "modern", "new". it literary direction considered a reaction to human rights abuses, the horrors of war and post-war events. It was born from the denial of the ideas of the Enlightenment, realism and modernism. The latter was popular at the beginning of the 20th century. But if in modernism the main goal of the author is to find meaning in a changing world, then postmodern writers talk about the meaninglessness of what is happening. They deny patterns and prioritize chance. Irony, black humor, fragmented narrative, mixing of genres - these are the main features characteristic of postmodern literature. Below Interesting Facts and best works representatives of this literary movement.
The most significant works
The 1960s - 1980s are considered the heyday of the direction. At this time, the novels of William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Philip Dick and Kurt Vonnegut were published. These are prominent representatives of postmodernism in foreign literature. Philip Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1963) takes you into an alternate version of history where Germany won the Second World War. The work was awarded the prestigious Hugo Prize. Joseph Heller's anti-war novel Amendment 22 (1961) ranks 11th on the list of 200 best books according to the BBC. The author skillfully ridicules the bureaucracy here against the background of military events.Contemporary foreign postmodernists deserve special attention. This is Haruki Murakami and his "Chronicles of a Clockwork Bird" (1997) - a novel full of mysticism, reflections and memories of the most famous Japanese writer in Russia. "American Psychopath" by Bret Easton Ellis (1991) strikes with its cruelty and dark humor even for connoisseurs of the genre. There is a film adaptation of the same name with Christian Bale as the main maniac (directed by Mary Herron, 2000).
Examples of postmodernism in Russian literature are the books "Pale Flame" and "Hell" by Vladimir Nabokov (1962, 1969), "Moscow-Petushki" by Venedikt Erofeev (1970), "School for Fools" by Sasha Sokolov (1976), "Chapaev and Emptiness" Victor Pelevin (1996).
Vladimir Sorokin, a multiple laureate of national and international literary awards, writes in the same vein. His novel Marina's Thirteenth Love (1984) sarcastically illustrates the country's Soviet past. The lack of individuality of that generation has been brought to the point of absurdity. Sorokin's most provocative work, Blue Lard (1999), will turn all ideas about history upside down. It was this novel that elevated Sorokin to the rank of classics of postmodern literature.
Influence of the classics
The works of postmodern writers amaze the imagination, erase the boundaries of genres, and change ideas about the past. Interestingly, however, postmodernism was strongly influenced by classical works the Spanish writer Miguel De Cervantes, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, the French philosopher Voltaire, the English novelist Lorenzo Stern, and the Arabic tales from the book A Thousand and One Nights. In the creations of these authors there are parodies and unusual forms of storytelling - the forerunners of a new direction.Which of these masterpieces of postmodernism in Russian and foreign literature have you missed? Rather add to your electronic shelf. Enjoy reading and diving into the world of satire, wordplay and stream of consciousness!
A characteristic feature of postmodernism in literature is the recognition of the diversity and diversity of socio-political, ideological, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic values. Postmodern aesthetics rejects the principle of interconnection that has already become traditional for art artistic image and the realities of reality. In the postmodern understanding, the objectivity of the real world is questioned, since the diversity of the world on the scale of all mankind reveals the relativity of religious faith, ideology, social, moral and legal 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 art. This is also the reason for the postmodern ironic game with images already known (to one degree or another) to the reader, which received the name simulacrum(from the French. simulacre (similarity, appearance) - imitation of an image that does not mean any reality, moreover, indicates its absence).
In the understanding of postmodernists, the history of mankind appears as a chaotic heap of accidents, human life is devoid of any common sense. An obvious consequence of this attitude is that the literature of postmodernism uses the richest arsenal artistic means, which has been accumulated by creative practice 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 a modern person, borrowing plots from classical literature - all this, colored with 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 different principles of attitude to reality, known in the artistic practice of the past, is similar to the behavior of a person who goes through old photographs and yearns for something that has 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 explanatory prophet or teacher, the postmodernist writer provokes the reader to actively co-create in search of all sorts of motivations for the events and behavior of the characters. In contrast to the realist author, who is the bearer of truth and evaluates heroes and events from the standpoint of the norm known to him, the postmodern 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 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... In contrast to the avant-gardists, postmodernists refuse not only from socio-political engagement, but also from 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 XX century, postmodernism as artistic thinking for the first time and regardless foreign literature declared himself in the novel by Andrey Bitov “ Pushkin house"(1964-1971). The novel was banned from publication, the reader got to know him only in the late 1980s, along with other works of "returned" literature. The rudiments of a postmodern worldview were also found in Ven's poem. Erofeeva " Moscow - Petushki», Written in 1969 and for a long time known only from samizdat, the general reader also got 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 the official art) and “ tendentious". In conceptualism, the author hides behind various stylistic masks; in the works of tendentious postmodernism, on the contrary, the author's myth is cultivated. Conceptualism balances on the edge between ideology and art, critically rethinking and destroying (demythologizing) symbols and styles that are significant for the culture of the past (primarily socialist); tendentious postmodernist currents are directed to reality and to human personality; associated with Russian classical literature, they are aimed at a new myth-making - the remythologization of cultural debris. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a recurrence of techniques in postmodern literature, which may be a sign of the system's self-destruction.
In the late 1990s, the modernist principles of creating an artistic image were implemented in two styles: the first goes back to stream of consciousness literature, and the second - to surrealism.
Used materials of the book: Literature: uch. for stud. wednesday prof. study. institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M .: "Academy", 2010