Postmodernism as a literary movement originates at the end of the 20th century. It arises as a protest to the foundations, excluding any restrictions on actions and techniques, erases the boundaries between styles and gives authors absolute freedom of creativity. The main vector of development of postmodernism is the overthrow of all established norms, the mixing of “high” values and “low” needs.
The convergence of elite modernist literature, which was difficult for most of society to understand, and primitivism, rejected by intellectuals due to its stereotypes, aimed to get rid of the shortcomings of each style.
(Irene Cheri "Behind the Book")
The exact origins of this style are uncertain. However, its origin is the reaction of society to the results of the era of modernism, the end of World War II, the horrors that occurred in the concentration camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the first works include “The Dismemberment of Orpheus” (Ihab Hassan), “Cannibal” (John Hawkes) and “The Scream” (Allen Ginsberg).
Postmodernism received its conceptual design and theoretical definition only in the 1980s. This was facilitated, first of all, by the developments of Zh.F. Lyotard. The magazine "October", published in the USA, actively promoted the postmodernist ideas of outstanding representatives of cultural studies, philosophy and literary studies.
Postmodernism in Russian literature of the 20th century
The contrast between avant-garde and modernism, where the mood was felt Silver Age, in Russian postmodernism was expressed by a rejection of realism. Writers in their works describe harmony as a utopia. They find a compromise with chaos and space. The first independent response to postmodernism in Russia is Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House. However, the reader was able to enjoy it only 10 years after its release, since its publication was banned.
(Andrey Anatolyevich Shustov "Ballad")
Russian postmodernism owes the versatility of its images to domestic socialist realism. It is this that is the starting point for thinking and developing the characters in books of this direction.
Representatives
The ideas of comparing opposing concepts are clearly expressed in the works of the following writers:
- S. Sokolov, A. Bitov, V. Erofeev - paradoxical compromises between life and death;
- V. Pelevin, T. Tolstaya - the contact between the real and the fantasy;
- Pietsukh - the border between foundations and absurdity;
- V. Aksyonov, A. Sinyavsky, L. Petrushevskaya, S. Dovlatov - denial of any authority, organic chaos, combination of several directions, genres and eras on the pages of one work.
(Nazim Gadzhiev "Eight" (seven dogs, one cat))
Directions
Based on the concepts of “world as text”, “world as chaos”, “author’s mask”, “double move”, the directions of postmodernism, by definition, have no specific boundaries. However, analyzing domestic literature the end of the 20th century, some features stand out:
- The orientation of culture towards itself, and not towards the real world;
- The texts originate from the drains historical eras;
- Ephemerality and illusoryness, artificiality of actions,
- Metaphysical closure;
- Nonselection;
- Fantastic parody and irony;
- Logic and absurdity are combined in a single image;
- Violation of the law of sufficient justification and exclusion of third meaning.
Postmodernism in foreign literature of the 20th century
The literary concepts of the French poststructuralists are of particular interest to the American literary community. It is against this background that Western theories of postmodernism are formed.
(Portrait - collage from a mosaic of works of art)
The point of no return to modernism becomes an article by Leslie Fiedler published in Playboy. The very title of the text blatantly demonstrates the convergence of opposites - “Cross borders, fill ditches.” During the formation of literary postmodernity, the tendency to overcome the boundaries between “books for intellectuals” and “stories for the ignorant” is gaining more and more momentum. As a result of development, between foreign works certain characteristic features are visible.
Some features of postmodernism in the works of Western authors:
- Decanonization of official norms;
- Ironic attitude towards values;
- Filling with quotes, short statements;
- Denial of the singular self in favor of the many;
- Innovations in forms and methods of expressing thoughts in the course of changing genres;
- Hybridization of techniques;
- A humorous look at everyday situations, laughter as one of the aspects of life's disorder;
- Theatricality. Playing with plots, images, text and the reader;
- Acceptance of the diversity of life through humility with chaotic events. Pluralism.
The USA is considered the birthplace of postmodernism as a literary movement. Postmodernism is most clearly reflected in creativity American writers, namely the followers of the “school of black humor” represented by Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelemy, John Barth, James Patrick Dunleavy.
Literary panorama of the second half of the 1990s. is determined by the interaction of two aesthetic trends: realistic, rooted in the tradition of the previous literary history, and new, postmodern. Russian postmodernism as a literary and artistic movement is often associated with the period of the 1990s, although in fact it has a significant prehistory, dating back at least four decades. Its occurrence was completely natural and was determined both by internal laws literary development, and at a certain stage public consciousness. Postmodernism is not so much aesthetics as philosophy, a type of thinking, a way of feeling and thinking that has found its expression in literature.
The claim to the total universality of postmodernism in both the philosophical and literary spheres became obvious by the second half of the 1990s, when this aesthetics and the artists representing it turned from literary fringes into rulers of the thoughts of a reading public that had thinned out by that time. It was then that Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin took the place of the key figures of modern literature, deliberately shocking the reader. The shock impression from their works on a person brought up on realistic literature is associated not only with external attributes, a deliberate violation of literary and general cultural speech etiquette (use of obscene language, reproduction of the jargon of the lowest social environment), the removal of all ethical taboos (detailed, deliberately understated depiction of multiple sexual acts and anti-aesthetic physiological manifestations), a fundamental rejection of realistic or at least somehow vitally rational motivation for the character’s character or behavior. The shock of encountering the works of Sorokin or Pelevin was caused by a fundamentally different understanding of the reality reflected in them than before; the doubt of the authors in the very existence of reality, private and historical time, cultural and socio-historical reality (novels “Chapaev and Emptiness”, “Generation P” by V. O. Pelevin); deliberate destruction of classical realistic literary models, natural rationally explainable cause-and-effect relationships of events and phenomena, motivations for the actions of characters, the development of plot collisions ("Norma" and "Novel" by V. G. Sorokin). Ultimately - doubt in the possibility of rational explanations of existence. All this was often interpreted in literary critical periodicals of traditional realistically oriented publications as a mockery of the reader, literature, and people in general. It must be said that the texts of these writers, filled with sexual or fecal motifs, fully provided grounds for such a critical interpretation. However, strict critics unwittingly became victims of writerly provocation and 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, These are just letters on paper." The writer’s statement contains the key not only to his understanding of literature, but also to postmodern consciousness as a whole.
The point is that in its aesthetic basis, the literature of postmodernism is not just sharply opposed to realistic literature - it has a fundamentally different artistic nature. Traditional literary movements, which include classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism and, of course, realism, are one way or another focused on reality, which acts as the subject of the image. In this case, the relationship of art to reality can be very different. It can be determined by the desire of literature to imitate life (Aristotelian mimesis), to explore reality, to study it from the point of view of socio-historical processes, which is characteristic of classical realism, to create some ideal models of social relations (classicism or realism of N. G. Chernyshevsky, the author of the novel " What to do?”), directly influence reality, changing a person, “shaping” him, drawing various social masks-types of his era (socialist realism). In any case, the fundamental correlation and relevance of literature and reality is beyond doubt. Exactly
Therefore, some scholars propose to characterize such literary movements or creative methods as primary aesthetic systems.
The essence of postmodern literature is completely different. It does not at all set as its task (at least, so it is declared) the study of reality; Moreover, the very correlation between literature and life, the connection between them is denied in principle (literature is “a dead world”, heroes are “just letters on paper”). In this case, the subject of literature is not the true social or ontological reality, but the previous culture: literary and non-literary literary texts 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 thieves' jargon. The subject of literature is mythology, mainly 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.
Thus, the fundamental difference between postmodernism and, say, realistic aesthetics is that it is secondary artistic system, exploring not reality, but past ideas about it, chaotically, bizarrely and unsystematically mixing and rethinking them. Postmodernism as a literary-aesthetic system or creative method is prone to deep self-reflection. He develops his own metalanguage, a complex of specific concepts and terms, and forms around himself a whole corpus of texts that describe his vocabulary and grammar. In this sense, it appears as a normative aesthetics, in which the work of art itself is preceded by previously formulated theoretical norms of its poetics.
The theoretical foundations of postmodernism were laid in the 1960s. among French scientists and poststructuralist philosophers. The birth of postmodernism is illuminated by the authority of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Francois Lyotard, who created a scientific structural-semiotic school in France in the middle of the last century, which predetermined the birth and expansion of an entire literary movement in both European and Russian literature . Russian postmodernism is a completely different phenomenon from European, but the philosophical basis of postmodernism was created precisely then, and Russian postmodernism would be impossible without it, just like European one. That is why, before turning to the history of Russian postmodernism, it is necessary to dwell on its basic terms and concepts, developed almost half a century ago.
Among the works laying cornerstones postmodern consciousness, it is necessary to highlight the articles of R. Barth "Death of the Author"(1968) and Y. Kristeva "Bakhtin, word, dialogue and novel"(1967). It was in these works that the basic concepts of postmodernism were introduced and substantiated: the world as a text, the death of the Author And birth of the reader, scriptor, intertext And intertextuality. The basis of postmodern consciousness is the idea of the fundamental completeness of history, which is manifested in the exhaustion of creative potentials human culture, the completeness of its development circle. Everything that exists now has already been and will still be, history and culture move in circles, in essence, doomed to repetition and marking time. The same thing happens with literature: everything has already been written, it is impossible to create something new, 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, a modern writer is not the author of his books, because everything that he can write was written before him, much earlier. All he can do is quote, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, previous texts. In essence, a modern writer is only a compiler of previously created texts. Therefore, in postmodern criticism, “The author becomes smaller in stature, like a figure in the very depths of the literary stage.” Modern literary texts are created by scriptor(English - scriptor), fearlessly compiling texts from previous eras:
"His hand<...>makes a purely descriptive (and not expressive) gesture and outlines a certain sign field that does not have a starting point - in any case, it comes only from language as such, and it tirelessly calls into question any idea of a starting point."
Here we encounter the fundamental concept of postmodern criticism. The death of the Author calls into question the very content of the text, saturated with the author's meaning. It turns out that the text cannot initially contain any meaning. This is “a multidimensional space where different types of writing combine and argue with each other, none of which is original; the text is woven from quotations that refer to thousands of cultural sources,” and the writer (i.e., scriptor) “can only imitate forever what was written before and was not written for the first time." This thesis of Barthes is the starting point for such a concept of postmodern aesthetics as intertextuality:
“...Any text is constructed as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text,” wrote Yu. Kristeva, justifying the concept of intertextuality.
At the same time, the infinite number of sources “absorbed” by the test loses their original meaning, if they ever had it, and enters into new semantic connections with each other, which only the reader. A similar ideology characterized the French poststructuralists in general:
“The scriptwriter, who has replaced the Author, carries within himself not passions, moods, feelings or impressions, but only such an immense vocabulary from which he draws his writing, which knows no stop; life only imitates the book, and the book itself is woven from signs, itself imitates something already forgotten, and so on ad infinitum."
But why, when reading a work, are we convinced that it still has meaning? Because it is not the author who puts meaning into the text, but reader. To the best of his talent, he brings together all the beginnings and ends of the text, thus putting his own meaning into it. Therefore, one of the postulates of the postmodernist worldview is the idea multiple interpretations of the work, each of which has the right to exist. Thus, the figure of the reader, its importance, increases immensely. The reader, who puts meaning into the work, seems to take the place of the author. The death of the Author is literature's price for the birth of the reader.
In essence, other concepts of postmodernism are based on these theoretical provisions. So, postmodern sensibility presupposes a total crisis of faith, a modern person’s perception of the world as chaos, where all original semantic and value orientations are absent. Intertextuality, implying a chaotic combination of codes, signs, symbols of previous texts in the text, leads to a special postmodern form of parody - pastiche, expressing total postmodernist irony over the very possibility of the existence of a single, once and for all fixed meaning. Simulacrum becomes a sign that does not mean anything, a sign of a simulation of reality, not correlated with it, but only with other simulacra, which create an unreal postmodern world of simulations and inauthenticities.
The basis of the postmodernist attitude towards the world of previous culture is its deconstruction. This concept is traditionally associated with the name of J. Derrida. The term itself, which includes two prefixes that are opposite in meaning ( de– destruction and con – creation) denotes ambiguity in relation to the object under study - text, discourse, mythology, any concept of the collective subconscious. The operation of deconstruction implies the destruction of the original meaning and its simultaneous creation.
"The meaning of deconstruction<...>consists in identifying the internal inconsistency of the text, in discovering in it hidden and unnoticed not only by the inexperienced, “naive” reader, but also residual meanings that elude the author himself (“sleeping”, in the words of Jacques Derrida), inherited from speech, otherwise - discursive practices of the past, enshrined in language in the form of unconscious thought stereotypes, which in turn, just as unconsciously and independently of the author of the text, are transformed under the influence of the linguistic clichés of the era."
Now it becomes clear that the very period of publishing, which simultaneously brought together different eras, decades, ideological guidelines, cultural preferences, diaspora and metropolis, writers living and those who passed away five to seven decades ago, created the ground for postmodern sensitivity and imbued magazine pages with obvious intertextuality. It was under these conditions that the expansion of postmodern literature in the 1990s became possible.
However, by that time Russian postmodernism had a certain historical and literary tradition, dating back to the 1960s. By absolutely obvious reasons until the mid-1980s. it was a marginal, underground, catacomb phenomenon of Russian literature - both literally and figuratively. For example, Abram Tertz’s book “Walking with Pushkin” (1966–1968), which is considered one of the first works of Russian postmodernism, was written in prison and sent out under the guise of letters to his wife. Roman by Andrey Bitov "Pushkin House"(1971) stood on par with the book by Abram Tertz. These works were brought together by a common subject of depiction - Russian classical literature and mythologies generated by more than a hundred years of tradition of its interpretation. It was they who became the object of postmodern deconstruction. A.G. Bitov wrote, by his own admission, “an anti-textbook of Russian literature.”
In 1970, a poem by Venedikt Erofeev was created "Moscow - Petushki", which gives a powerful impetus to the development of Russian postmodernism. Comically mixing many discourses of Russian and Soviet culture By immersing them in the everyday and speech situation of a Soviet alcoholic, Erofeev seemed to be following the path of classical postmodernism. Combining ancient tradition Russian foolishness, explicit or hidden quotation of classical texts, fragments of the works of Lenin and Marx memorized at school with the author-narrator experiencing the situation of traveling on a commuter train in a state of severe intoxication, he achieved both the effect of pastiche and the intertextual richness of the work, which has a truly limitless semantic inexhaustibility, suggesting a multiplicity of interpretations. However, the poem “Moscow - Petushki” showed that Russian postmodernism is not always comparable to the canon of a similar Western movement. Erofeev fundamentally rejected the concept of the death of the Author. It was the view of the author-narrator that formed a single point of view on the world in the poem, and the state of intoxication seemed to sanction the complete absence of the cultural hierarchy of the semantic layers included in it.
Development of Russian postmodernism in the 1970s–1980s. went primarily in line conceptualism. Genetically, this phenomenon goes back to the “Lianozov” poetic school of the late 1950s, to the first experiments of V. N. Nekrasov. However, Moscow poetic conceptualism took shape as an independent phenomenon within Russian postmodernism in the 1970s. One of the founders of this school was Vsevolod Nekrasov, and the most prominent representatives were Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, and a little later Timur Kibirov.
The essence of conceptualism was thought of as a radical change in the subject of aesthetic activity: an orientation not towards the image of reality, but towards the knowledge of language in its metamorphoses. At the same time, the object of poetic deconstruction turned out to be speech and mental clichés Soviet era. It was an aesthetic reaction to the late, deadened and ossified socialist realism with its worn-out formulas and ideologemes, slogans, and meaningless propaganda texts. They were thought of as concepts, the deconstruction of which was carried out by conceptualists. The author's "I" was absent, dissolved in "quotations", "voices", "opinions". In essence, the language of the Soviet era was subjected to total deconstruction.
The strategy of conceptualism manifested itself with particular clarity in creative practice Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov(1940–2007), the creator of many myths (including the myth of himself as a modern Pushkin), parodying Soviet ideas about the world, literature, life, love, the relationship between man and government, etc. In his work, Soviet ideologemes about Great Labor and omnipotent Power (the image of Militsaner) were transformed and postmodernly profaned. The mask images in Prigov’s poems, “the flickering sensation of the presence - absence of the author in the text” (L. S. Rubinstein) turned out to be a manifestation of the concept of the death of the Author. Parodic quotation, the removal of the traditional opposition of ironic and serious determined the presence of postmodern pastiche in one hundred poetry and, as it were, reproduced the categories of the Soviet mentality " little man". In the poems “Here the cranes are flying with a scarlet stripe...”, “I found a number on my meter...”, “Here I am frying a chicken...” conveyed the psychological complexes of the hero, revealed a shift in the real proportions of the picture of the world. All this was accompanied by the creation of quasi-genres of Prigov’s poetry: “philosophems”, “pseudo-verses”, “pseudo-obituary”, “opus”, etc.
In creativity Lev Semenovich Rubinstein(b. 1947) “a more rigid version of conceptualism” was realized (M. N. Epstein). He wrote his poems on separate cards, and an important element of his work became performance – presentation of poems, their author's performance. Holding and sorting through cards on which a word was written, only one line of poetry, nothing was written, he seemed to emphasize a new principle of poetics - the poetics of “catalogues”, poetic “card indexes”. The card became an elementary unit of text, connecting poetry and prose.
“Each card,” the poet said, “is both an object and a universal unit of rhythm that aligns any speech gesture - from a detailed theoretical message to an interjection, from a stage direction to a fragment telephone conversation. A pack of cards is an object, a volume, it is NOT a book, it is the brainchild of the “non-Guttenberg” existence of verbal culture."
A special place among conceptualists occupies Timur Yurievich Kibirov(b. 1955). Using the technical techniques of conceptualism, he comes to a different interpretation of the Soviet past than his older colleagues. We can talk about something peculiar critical sentimentalism Kibirov, which appeared in such poems as “To the Artist Semyon Faibisovich”, “Just say the word “Russia” ...”, “Twenty Sonnets to Sasha Zapoeva”. Traditional poetic themes and genres are not at all subject to total and destructive deconstruction by Kibirov. For example, topic poetic creativity is developed by him in poems - friendly messages to “L. S. Rubinstein”, “Love, Komsomol and Spring. D. A. Prigov”, etc. In this case, there is no need to talk about the death of the Author: the activity of the author’s “I” is manifested in a kind of lyricism poems and poems by Kibirov, in their tragicomic coloring. His poetry embodied the worldview of a man at the end of history, who is in a situation of cultural vacuum and suffers from it (“Draft reply to Gugolev”).
The central figure of modern Russian postmodernism can be considered Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin(b. 1955). The beginning of his work, which occurred in the mid-1980s, firmly connects the writer with conceptualism. He did not lose this connection in his subsequent works, although the modern stage of his work, of course, is broader than the conceptualist canon. Sorokin is a great stylist; the subject of image and reflection in his work is precisely style - both Russian classical and Soviet literature. L. S. Rubinstein very accurately described Sorokin’s creative strategy:
“All his works – varied thematically and in genre – are built, in essence, on one technique. I would designate this technique as “hysteria of style.” 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 is actually adequacy of a different order. It is as lawless as it is lawful."
Indeed, Vladimir Sorokin’s strategy consists of a ruthless collision of two discourses, two languages, two incompatible cultural layers. Philosopher and philologist Vadim Rudnev describes this technique as follows:
"Most often his stories follow the same pattern. At first there is an ordinary, slightly overly juicy parody Sotsart text: a story about a hunt, a Komsomol meeting, a meeting of the party committee - but suddenly something completely unexpected and unmotivated happens<...>a breakthrough into something terrible and terrible, which, according to Sorokin, is real reality. It’s as if Pinocchio pierced a canvas with a painted fireplace with his nose, but found there not a door, but something like what is shown in modern horror films.”
Texts by V. G. Sorokin began to be published in Russia only in the 1990s, although he began actively writing 10 years earlier. In the mid-1990s, the writer's main works, created in the 1980s, were published. and already known abroad: the novels “Queue” (1992), “Norma” (1994), “Marina’s Thirtieth Love” (1995). In 1994, Sorokin wrote the story "Hearts of Four" and the novel "Roman". His novel “Blue Lard” (1999) became absolutely scandalous. In 2001, a collection of new stories, “The Feast,” was published, and in 2002, a novel, “Ice,” was published, in which the author allegedly breaks with conceptualism. The most representative books of Sorokin are “Novel” and “Feast”.
Ilyin I. P. Postmodernism: Words, terms. M., 2001. P. 56.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 interconnection that has already become traditional for art. artistic image and the realities of reality. In the postmodern understanding, objectivity real world is questioned, since ideological diversity on the scale of all humanity reveals the relativity of religious faith, ideology, social, moral and legislative norms. From the point of view of a postmodernist, the material of art is not so much reality itself as its images embodied in different types art. This also explains the postmodern ironic play with images already known (to one degree or another) to the reader, which are called simulacrum(from the French simulacre (similarity, appearance) - an imitation of an image that does not indicate any reality, moreover, indicates its absence).
In the understanding of postmodernists, human history appears as a chaotic accumulation 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 a rich arsenal artistic means, which creative practice has accumulated over many centuries in different eras and in different cultures. The quotation of the text, the combination of various genres in it, both mass and elite culture, high vocabulary with low, specific historical realities with psychology and speech modern man, borrowing plots from classical literature - all this, colored by the pathos of irony, and in some cases, self-irony, are characteristic features of postmodern writing.
The irony of many postmodernists can be called nostalgic. Their play with various principles of attitude to reality, known in artistic practice of the past, is similar to the behavior of a person going through old photographs and yearning for what did not come true.
The artistic strategy of postmodernism in art, denying the rationalism of realism with its faith in man and historical progress, also rejects the idea of the interdependence of character and circumstances. Refusing the role of an all-explaining prophet or teacher, the postmodernist writer provokes the reader into active co-creation in search of various kinds of motivations for events and the behavior of characters. Unlike the realist author, who is the bearer of truth and evaluates heroes and events from the standpoint of the norm known to him, the postmodernist author does not evaluate anything or anyone, and his “truth” is one of the equal positions in the text.
Conceptually, “postmodernism” is opposed not only to realism, but also to modernist and avant-garde art of the early 20th century. If a person in modernism wondered who he was, then a postmodern person trying to figure out where he is. Unlike the avant-garde artists, postmodernists refuse not only socio-political engagement, but also the creation of new socio-utopian projects. The implementation of any social utopia with the aim of overcoming chaos with harmony, according to postmodernists, will inevitably lead to violence against man and the world. Taking the chaos of life for granted, they try to enter into a constructive dialogue with it.
In Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism as artistic thinking for the first time and independently of foreign literature declared itself in Andrei Bitov’s novel “ Pushkin House"(1964-1971). The novel was banned from publication; the reader became acquainted with it only in the late 1980s, along with other works of “returned” literature. The beginnings of a postmodernist worldview were also revealed in Wen’s poem. Erofeeva " Moscow — Petushki”, written in 1969 and for a long time known only from samizdat, the general reader also became acquainted with it in the late 1980s.
In modern domestic postmodernism in general, two trends can be distinguished: “ tendentious» ( conceptualism, who declared himself as an opposition to official art) and “ untendentious" In conceptualism, the author hides behind various stylistic masks; in works of untendentious postmodernism, on the contrary, the author's myth is cultivated. Conceptualism balances on the line between ideology and art, critically rethinking and destroying (demythologizing) symbols and styles that are significant for the culture of the past (primarily socialist); untendentious postmodern movements are directed towards reality and human personality; associated with Russian classical literature, they are aimed at new myth-making - the remythologization of cultural debris. Since the mid-1990s, postmodern literature has seen a repetition of techniques, which may be a sign of the self-destruction of the system.
At the end of the 1990s, modernist principles of creating an artistic image were implemented in two stylistic movements: the first goes back to the literature of the “stream of consciousness”, and the second to surrealism.
Book materials used: Literature: textbook. for students avg. prof. textbook institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M.: "Academy", 2010
Modernism (fr. newest, modern) in literature is a direction, an aesthetic concept. Modernism is associated with the comprehension and embodiment of a certain supernaturalness, superreality. The starting point of modernism is the chaotic nature of the world, its absurdity. The indifference and hostile attitude of the outside world towards a person lead to the awareness of other spiritual values and bring a person to a transpersonal basis.
The modernists broke all traditions with classical literature, trying to create a completely new modern literature, placing above all else the value of the individual artistic vision of the world; created by them art worlds unique. The most popular topic for modernists is the conscious and unconscious and the ways they interact. The hero of the works is typical. Modernists turned to inner world average person: they described his most subtle feelings, pulled out his most deep feelings, which the literature has not previously described. They turned the hero inside out and showed everything that was indecently personal. The main technique in the work of modernists is the “stream of consciousness,” which allows one to capture the movement of thoughts, impressions, and feelings.
Modernism consists of different schools: imagism, dadaism, expressionism, constructivism, surrealism, etc.
Representatives of modernism in literature: V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, E. Guro, B. Livshits, A. Kruchenykh, early L. Andreev, S. Sokolov, V. Lavrenev, R. Ivnev.
Postmodernism initially appeared in Western art, arose as a contrast to modernism, which was open to understanding by a select few. A characteristic feature of Russian literary postmodernism is a frivolous attitude towards its past, history, folklore, and classical literature. Sometimes this unacceptability of traditions goes to extremes. The main techniques of postmodernists: paradoxes, wordplay, use of profanity. The main purpose of postmodern texts is to entertain and ridicule. These works, for the most part, do not carry deep ideas; they are based on word creation, i.e. text for text's sake. Russian postmodern creativity is a process of language games, the most common of which is the play on quotes from classical literature. The motive, the plot, and the myth can be quoted.
The most common genres of postmodernism: diaries, notes, collections of short fragments, letters, comments written by characters in novels.
Representatives of postmodernism: Ven. Erofeev, A. Bitov, E. Popov, M. Kharitonov, V. Pelevin.
Russian postmodernism is heterogeneous. It is represented by two movements: conceptualism and social art.
Conceptualism is aimed at debunking and critically understanding all ideological theories, ideas and beliefs. In modern Russian literature, the most prominent representatives of conceptualism are the poets Lev Rubinstein, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov.
Sots art in Russian literature can be understood as a variant of conceptualism, or pop art. All works of socialist art are built on the basis of socialist realism: ideas, symbols, ways of thinking, and the ideology of the culture of the Soviet era.
Representatives of Sots Art: Z. Gareev, A. Sergeev, A. Platonova, V. Sorokin, A. Sergeev
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The postmodernist trend in literature was born in the second half of the 20th century. Translated from Latin and French“postmodern” means “modern”, “new”. This literary movement is considered a reaction to the infringement of human rights, the horrors of war and post-war events. It was born from the rejection of the ideas of the Enlightenment, realism and modernism. The latter was popular at the beginning of the twentieth century. But if in modernism the main goal of the author is to find meaning in a changing world, then postmodernist writers talk about the meaninglessness of what is happening. They deny patterns and put chance above all else. Irony, black humor, fragmented narration, mixing of genres - these are the main features characteristic of postmodern literature. Below interesting facts and the best works of representatives of this literary movement.
The most significant works
The heyday of the direction is considered to be 1960–1980. At this time, novels by William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut were published. These are bright representatives of postmodernism in foreign literature. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1963) takes you to an alternate version of history where Germany won World War II. The work was awarded prestigious award"Hugo". Joseph Heller's anti-war novel Catch-22 (1961) ranks 11th on the 200 list best books according to the BBC. The author skillfully makes fun of bureaucracy here against the backdrop of military events.Contemporary foreign postmodernists deserve special attention. This is Haruki Murakami and his “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” (1997) - a novel full of mysticism, reflections and memories by the most famous Japanese writer in Russia. “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis (1991) amazes even connoisseurs of the genre with its cruelty and black humor. There is a film adaptation of the same name with Christian Bale in the role of the main maniac (dir. Mary Herron, 2000).
Examples of postmodernism in Russian literature are the books “Pale Fire” 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 winner of domestic 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 is brought to the point of absurdity here. 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.
Classical influence
The works of postmodern writers amaze the imagination, blur the boundaries of genres, and change ideas about the past. However, it is interesting that postmodernism was strongly influenced by classical works Spanish writer Miguel De Cervantes, Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, French philosopher Voltaire, English novelist Lorenzo Stern and Arabian tales from the book "A Thousand and One Nights". The works of these authors contain parody and unusual shapes narratives are the forerunners of a new direction.Which of these masterpieces of postmodernism in Russian and foreign literature did you miss? Hurry up and add it to your electronic shelf. Happy reading and immersion in the world of satire, wordplay and stream of consciousness!
