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Svetlana Stomatova
3) confusion of the
person about his own existence,
4) looking at the everyday reality as
the theatre of the absurd,
5) focus
on ideological impartiality,
6) deep reflexivity,
7) irony and
self-critics,
8) shocking behavior (from traditional narrow-minded point of view),
9) intertextuality, dialogism, ambivalence (as ideological positions),
10) emphasis on marginal (meaning ‘ultimate, opposite to central’) changing into
central / typical etc.
The above-mentioned features of post-modernism are a generalization of the
experience of Russian
and foreign authors, and they will be used as a "working version" of the
current state of literature. These features are universal, and they are inherent in all national
cultures possessing the artistic reflection on the postmodern situation. However,
Postmodernism acquires its own specific features in different countries, which can be seen in
adding the original features to the world phenomenon and combining the above-mentioned
features in each national literature in different proportions and variations.
2.
The Formation Process of Post-Soviet Literature
The literary movements that have arisen in Russia since the end of the twentieth century is
mostly called the transitional period. In this period, the Russian literature escaped from the
tight control of the Soviet era and entered a new period with freedom of expression and
speech. In Russia, which experienced a literary boom in a way in this period, it can be seen
that a myriad of works written by foreign authors were translated into Russian after the
political censorship was abolished, and that Russian authors’ works that were forbidden in the
Soviet era started to meet the ordinary readers. Readers could now reach works such as
“Doctor Zivago” (Boris Pasternak), “Heart of a Dog” (Mihail Bulgakov), “Children of the
Arbat” (Anatoly Rybakov), “The Gulag Archipelago” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)with ease, and
the authors could speak their minds without mincing words and try out new styles tending
towards whatever movement they desired. As a result, the works of different periods and
movements along with aesthetic opinions appeared in books and magazines with relentless
speed and laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new post-modern aesthetics
that were
instantly combined in a single literary period.
On the other hand, the Russian researcher, Mihail Epstein (1996) touches on an
interesting matter in his article named “The Meaning and Source of Russian Post-
Modernism”. According to him, communism in Soviet period is a post-modern phenomenon
in itself. Epstein, who uses the term “simulacrum” (Baudrillard, 2014), which the French
philosopher, Jean Baudrillard suggested in his article, as base, argues that the Soviet realism
consists of some kind of a simulation similar to the one in post-modernism. According to
Epstein, the simulative projects of communism replaced the real life and produced
simulacrum, that is, a product of imitation such as a “happy childhood”, “live to reach big
goals” and “the moral and material wealth of a Soviet worker”. Therefore, imitated history
replaced the genuine history, and the typical heroes of the socialist reality replaced the real
people. For this reason, it is considered that the first post-modernist examples of the Russian
literature emerged mostly as a reaction to the hyper-realistic authority of the total
communism.
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Problems of Formation of Russian Literature in
the Post-Soviet Period
We can agree with the researchers considering social realism to be a kind of
forerunner of postmodernism. For example, M. Lipovetsky writes that social realism "has
developed to an absurd point" such generic "characteristics of the avant-garde movements as
intentionality, aggressive intolerance to aesthetic dissent, pursuit of cultural monopoly"
(Lipovetsky, 1997, p.6); and the researcher G. Sivach (2011) generally uses the term "post-
socialist realism" to refer to the post-modern literary tendencies in post-communist countries.
As is known, the post-modern tendency in the field of literature started to form in the
1960’s and 1970’s. According to Andrey Zorin (1991), the first representative of this
movement is Venedikt Yerofeyev, who wrote “Moscow-Petushki”.
It was translated into
English a few different times under different names (such as Moscow to the End of the Line
and Moscow Stations). The author's surname is also spelled Erofeyev or Yerofeyev, to more
adequately reflect the pronunciation.
However, as it went beyond the understanding of the
social reality of the period, it was considered improper to be printed and subsisted as an
“
underground” work through “
samizdat” although it was written in 1969. On the other hand,
it can be seen that despite all these obstacles, this literary work had an extremely big impact
on the group of authors who
would later be called the generation of the
70’s in
terms of theme
and style.
Firstly, it should be mentioned that the generation of the 70’s which was called
the
first wave (Skoropanova, 2001) of the post-modernist tendency in Russia by Irina
Skoropanova developed in isolation from both Western post-modernism and the official
literary period imposed by the Soviet Union. On the other hand, it should be stated that the
works written by the generation of the 70’s could meet the readers at 1990’s and especially
started to be commented on by literary critics in this period. Among the first wave of Russian
post-modern authors mentioned above are A. Bitov (Pushkin House), A. Tertz (Strolls with
Pushkin), Sasha Sokolov (A School for Fools) and the first stories of L. Petrushevskaya.
The authors of
the first wave have some common characteristics such as readdressing
the stereotypes that are stuck in the collective subconscious such as Russian intellectuals,
national geniuses and Russian history with a world perspective against hierarchy and trying to
change the concepts such as time and setting, which are absolute and unchangeable for
centuries. The protagonists of such works stand out because they are not only indecisive and
ambivalent but also non-totalitarian. The settings in which these protagonists who are defined
as atypical, genuine and attributive exist are also multi-layered, fragmented and non-
totalitarian. The plots in the specified authors’ works mostly branch off. The important point
is not only one event that takes place in the protagonist’s subconscious, but it is the different
versions of that event. T. Kasatkina summarizes the literary understanding of the period
referring to the exaggerated reactions of such protagonists as “nothing has happened, but
everything has been experienced” and “the games that occur through secondary truth bring
only exhaustion and emptiness” (Kasatkina, 2010, pp 201-202).
In addition, it is remarkable that the Russian literature of the 70's owns the works of art
that combined the realism of the "thaw" with the elements of post-modern discourse - both in
poetics and ideology (works of Yu. Aleshkovskiy, B. Aksenov, F. Iskander, A. Kim,
Yu.Trifonov, R. Kireyeva etc.). According to M.Lipovetsky, the most important artistic
discovery of these writers was "post-modern attitude to the present, based on understanding
fortuity as a destiny” (Lipovetsky, 1997, p. 117).
In the 1980’s new developments for the Russian post-modernism can be seen. While
relativism and an anti-hierarchical world perspective is a product of individual conscious in