Closing the Circle: On the Poetics of Contemporary Russian Prose

This article attempts to define trends in prose at the turn of the Millennium. Discussion focuses on the following issues in the context of “pluralist” postmodern aesthetics in Russia: ambiguity as multilingualism and its hero-intermediary, s imulacra and homonymy, or the category of the “neo-real”,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRussian literature Vol. 65; no. 4; pp. 451 - 466
Main Author Ljunggren, Anna
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 15.05.2009
Subjects
Aesthetic subjects
Contemporary Russian Literature
Estetiska ämnen
HUMANIORA och RELIGIONSVETENSKAP
HUMANITIES and RELIGION
Literature
Litteraturvetenskap
Neo-Realism
Postmodernism
Slavic Languages
slaviska språk
Stylization
Postmodernism
Neo-Realism
Stylization
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Summary:This article attempts to define trends in prose at the turn of the Millennium. Discussion focuses on the following issues in the context of “pluralist” postmodern aesthetics in Russia: ambiguity as multilingualism and its hero-intermediary, s imulacra and homonymy, or the category of the “neo-real”, as Jean Baudrillard formulated it, in connection with stylization. Finally, it is maintained that the oversaturation of our contemporary culture with signs replacing reality has exhausted their potential “to mean” and invites the theme of Apocalypse as a last resort for producing meaning. Two ways out of this impasse seem to emerge in the mid-1990s: on the one hand, documentary genres; on the other, their opposite – the mythological novel. The aesthetic development of the 1990s seems, however, to have been impeded by the shrinking freedom of cultural expression in Russia.
ISSN:0304-3479
1878-3678
DOI:10.1016/j.ruslit.2009.07.003