The works of which writers belong to postmodernism. Postmodernism in Russian literature of the late 20th - early 21st centuries

Why is the literature of Russian postmodernism so popular? Everyone can relate to works that relate to this phenomenon in different ways: some may like them, some may not, but they still read such literature, so it is important to understand why it attracts readers so much? Perhaps young people, as the main audience for such works, after leaving school, "overfed" by classical literature (which is undoubtedly beautiful) want to breathe in fresh "postmodernism", albeit somewhere rough, somewhere even awkward, but so new and very emotional.

Russian postmodernism in literature dates back to the second half of the 20th century, when people brought up on realistic literature were shocked and bewildered. After all, the deliberate non-worship of the laws of literary and speech etiquette, the use of obscene language were not inherent in traditional trends.

The theoretical foundations of postmodernism were laid in the 1960s by French scientists and philosophers. Its Russian manifestation is different from the European one, but it would not have been so without its “progenitor”. It is believed that the postmodern beginning in Russia was laid when in 1970. Venedikt Erofeev creates the poem "Moscow-Petushki". This work, which we have carefully analyzed in this article, has a strong influence on the development of Russian postmodernism.

Brief description of the phenomenon

Postmodernism in literature is a large-scale cultural phenomenon that captured all spheres of art towards the end of the 20th century, replacing the no less well-known phenomenon of “modernism”. There are several basic principles of postmodernism:

The world as a text;
Death of the Author;
Birth of a reader;
Scriptor;
Lack of canons: there is no good and bad;
pastiche;
Intertext and intertextuality.

Since the main idea in postmodernism is that the author can no longer write anything fundamentally new, the idea of “the death of the Author” is being created. This means, in essence, that the writer is not the author of his books, since everything has already been written before him, and what follows is only quoting previous creators. That is why the author in postmodernism does not play a significant role, reproducing his thoughts on paper, he is just someone who presents what was written earlier in a different way, coupled with his personal style of writing, his original presentation and characters.

“The death of the author” as one of the principles of postmodernism gives rise to another idea that the text initially does not have any meaning embedded by the author. Since a writer is only a physical reproducer of something that has already been written before, he cannot put his subtext where there can be nothing fundamentally new. It is from here that another principle is born - “the birth of a reader”, which means that it is the reader, and not the author, who puts his own meaning into what he read. The composition, the lexicon chosen specifically for this style, the character of the characters, main and secondary, the city or place where the action takes place, excites in him his personal feelings from what he read, prompts him to search for the meaning that he initially lays on his own from the first lines he read.

And it is this principle of “the birth of a reader” that carries one of the main messages of postmodernism - any interpretation of the text, any attitude, any sympathy or antipathy for someone or something has the right to exist, there is no division into “good” and “bad” ”, as it happens in traditional literary movements.

In fact, all of the above postmodern principles carry the same meaning - the text can be understood in different ways, can be accepted in different ways, it can sympathize with someone, but not with someone, there is no division into "good" and " evil”, anyone who reads this or that work understands it in his own way and, based on his inner sensations and feelings, cognizes himself, and not what is happening in the text. When reading, a person analyzes himself and his attitude to what he read, and not the author and his attitude to it. He will not look for the meaning or subtext laid down by the writer, because it does not exist and cannot be, he, that is, the reader, will rather try to find what he himself puts into the text. We said the most important thing, you can read the rest, including the main features of postmodernism.

Representatives

There are quite a few representatives of postmodernism, but I would like to talk about two of them: Alexei Ivanov and Pavel Sanaev.

Alexei Ivanov is an original and talented writer who has appeared in Russian literature of the 21st century. It has been nominated three times for the National Bestseller Award. Laureate of the literary awards "Eureka!", "Start", as well as D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak and named after P.P. Bazhov.
Pavel Sanaev is an equally bright and outstanding writer of the 20th and 21st centuries. Laureate of the magazine "October" and "Triumph" for the novel "Bury me behind the plinth."

Examples

The geographer drank away the globe

Aleksey Ivanov is the author of such well-known works as The Geographer Drank His Globe Away, Dormitory on the Blood, Heart of Parma, The Gold of Riot, and many others. The first novel is heard mainly in films with Konstantin Khabensky in the title role, but the novel on paper is no less interesting and exciting than on the screen.

The Geographer Drank His Globe Away is a novel about a school in Perm, about teachers, about obnoxious children, and about an equally obnoxious geographer, who by profession is not a geographer at all. The book contains a lot of irony, sadness, kindness and humor. This creates a feeling of complete presence at the events taking place. Of course, as it suits the genre, there is a lot of veiled obscene and very original vocabulary here, and also the presence of jargon of the lowest social environment is the main feature.

The whole story seems to keep the reader in suspense, and now, when it seems that something should work out for the hero, this elusive ray of the sun is about to peek out from behind the gray gathering clouds, as the reader goes on a rampage again, because the luck and well-being of the heroes are limited only by the reader's hope for their existence somewhere at the end of the book.

This is what characterizes the story of Alexei Ivanov. His books make you think, get nervous, empathize with the characters or get angry at them somewhere, be perplexed or laugh at their witticisms.

Bury Me Behind the Baseboard

As for Pavel Sanaev and his emotional work Bury Me Behind the Plinth, it is a biographical story written by the author in 1994 based on his childhood, when he lived in his grandfather's family for nine years. The protagonist is the boy Sasha, a second-grader whose mother, not caring much about her son, puts him in the care of his grandmother. And, as we all know, it is contraindicated for children to stay with their grandparents for more than a certain period, otherwise there is either a colossal conflict based on misunderstanding, or, like the protagonist of this novel, everything goes much further, up to mental problems and a spoiled childhood.

This novel makes a stronger impression than, for example, The Geographer Drank His Globe Away or anything else from this genre, since the main character is a child, a boy who has not yet matured. He cannot change his life on his own, somehow help himself, as the characters of the aforementioned work or Dorm-on-Blood could do. Therefore, there is much more sympathy for him than for the others, and there is nothing to be angry with him for, he is a child, a real victim of real circumstances.

In the process of reading, again, there are jargon of the lowest social level, obscene language, numerous and very catchy insults towards the boy. The reader is constantly indignant at what is happening, he wants to quickly read the next paragraph, the next line or page to make sure that this horror is over, and the hero has escaped from this captivity of passions and nightmares. But no, the genre does not allow anyone to be happy, so this very tension drags on for all 200 book pages. The ambiguous actions of the grandmother and mother, the independent “digestion” of everything that happens on behalf of a little boy, and the presentation of the text itself are worth reading this novel.

Hostel-on-the-blood

Dormitory-on-the-Blood is a book by Alexei Ivanov, already known to us, the story of one student hostel, exclusively within the walls of which, by the way, most of the story takes place. The novel is saturated with emotions, because we are talking about students whose blood boils in their veins and youthful maximalism seethes. However, despite this some recklessness and recklessness, they are great lovers of philosophical conversations, talk about the universe and God, judge each other and blame, repent of their actions and make excuses for them. And at the same time, they have absolutely no desire to even slightly improve and make their existence easier.

The work is literally replete with an abundance of obscene language, which at first may repel someone from reading the novel, but even so, it is worth reading.

Unlike previous works, where the hope for something good faded already in the middle of reading, here it regularly lights up and goes out throughout the book, so the ending hits the emotions so hard and excites the reader so much.

How does postmodernism manifest itself in these examples?

What a hostel, what the city of Perm, what the house of Sasha Savelyev’s grandmother are strongholds of everything bad that lives in people, everything that we are afraid of and what we always try to avoid: poverty, humiliation, grief, insensitivity, self-interest, vulgarity and other things. Heroes are helpless, regardless of their age and social status, they are victims of circumstances, laziness, alcohol. Postmodernism in these books is manifested literally in everything: in the ambiguity of the characters, and in the reader's uncertainty about his attitude towards them, and in the vocabulary of the dialogues, and in the hopelessness of the existence of the characters, in their pity and despair.

These works are very difficult for receptive and over-emotional people, but you will not be able to regret what you read, because each of these books contains nutritious and useful food for thought.

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1. Features of Russian postmodernism. Its representatives

In a broad sense postmodernism- this is a general trend in European culture, which has its own philosophical base; it is a peculiar attitude, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a trend in literature and art, expressed in the creation of specific works.

Postmodernism entered the literary scene as a ready-made trend, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and currents: conceptualism and neo-baroque.

Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by Jacques Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is the complete rejection of the old, the creation of the new at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dissipation of the solid meanings of any phenomenon. The center of any system is a fiction, the authority of power is eliminated, the center depends on various factors.

Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, reality disappears under a stream of simulacra. (simulacrum- (from lat. Simulacrum, Idola, Phantasma)-conceptphilosophical discourse introduced in ancientthoughts to characterize, along with images-copies of things, images that are far from similar to things and express spiritual state, phantasms, chimeras, phantoms, ghosts, hallucinations, dream representations,fears, delirium)(Gilles Deleuze). The world turns into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or by other people.

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

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

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

So, the postmodern text is the interaction of the languages of the game, it does not imitate life, as the traditional one does. In postmodernism, the function of the author also changes: not to create by creating something new, but to recycle the old.

Mark Naumovich Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodern principle of paralogy and the concept of “paralogy”, highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western. Paralogy is “contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of intelligence as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of a binary situation, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of some one beginning, moreover, the possibility of the existence of an opposing one is recognized. The paralogic lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously, interact, but at the same time, the existence of a compromise between them is completely excluded. From this point of view, Russian postmodernism differs from Western:

* focusing just on the search for compromises and dialogic interfaces between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a "meeting point" between fundamentally incompatible in classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.

* at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally “paralogical”, they retain an explosive character, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to contradictory integrity.

The category of simulacra is somewhat different. Simulacra control people's behavior, their perception, and ultimately their consciousness, which ultimately leads to the "death of subjectivity": the human "I" is also made up of a set of simulacra.

The set of simulacra in postmodernism is opposed not to reality, but to its absence, that is, to emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become a source of reality generation only under the condition of realizing their simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of the initial disbelief in their reality. The existence of the category of simulacra forces its interaction with reality. Thus, a certain mechanism of aesthetic perception appears, which is characteristic of Russian postmodernism.

In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation - Integrity The category of Emptiness also acquires a different direction in Russian postmodernism. According to V. Pelevin, emptiness “does not reflect anything, and therefore nothing can be destined on it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, and so much so that no tool that has entered into a confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Due to this, Pelevin's emptiness has ontological supremacy over everything else and is an independent value. Emptiness will always remain Emptiness.

Opposition Personal - Impersonal is realized in practice as a person in the form of a changeable fluid integrity.

Memory - Oblivion- directly from A. Bitov is realized in the provision on culture: "... in order to save - it is necessary to forget."

Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky deduces another, broader one - the opposition Chaos - Space. “Chaos is a system whose activity is opposite to the indifferent disorder that reigns in a state of equilibrium; no stability any longer ensures the correctness of the macroscopic description, all possibilities are actualized, coexist and interact with each other, and the system turns out to be at the same time all that it can be. To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of "Chaosmos", which takes the place of harmony.

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

A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - the author - the narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their permanent affiliation is the archetype of the holy fool. More precisely, the archetype of the holy fool in the text is the center, the point where the main lines converge. Moreover, it can perform two functions (at least):

1. The classic version of the border subject, floating between the diametrical cultural codes.

2. At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism

Perhaps, none of the literary terms has been subjected to such a fierce discussion, which is around the term "postmodernism". Unfortunately, widespread use has robbed it of specific meaning; nevertheless, it seems possible to distinguish three main meanings in which this term is used in modern criticism:

1. works of literature and art created after World War II, not related to realism and made using non-traditional image techniques;

2. works of literature and art, made in the spirit of modernism, "brought to the extreme";

3. in an expanded sense - the state of man in the world of "developed capitalism" in the period from the end of the 50s. XX century to the present day, a time called by the theoretician of postmodernism J. - F. Lyotard "the era of the great meta-narratives of Western culture."

Myths that have been the basis of human knowledge since time immemorial and legitimized by generally accepted use - Christianity (and in a broader sense - belief in God in general), science, democracy, communism (as belief in the common good), progress, etc. - suddenly lost their indisputable authority, and with it humanity lost faith in their power, in the expediency of everything that was undertaken in the name of these principles. Such disappointment, the feeling of "lostness" led to a sharp decentralization of the cultural sphere of Western society. Thus, postmodernism is not only a lack of faith in Truth, which led to a misunderstanding and rejection of any existing truth or meaning, but also a set of efforts aimed at discovering the mechanisms of "historical construction of truths", as well as ways to hide them from the eyes of society. . The task of postmodernism in the broadest sense is to expose the impartial nature of the emergence and "naturalization" of truths, i.e. ways of their penetration into the public consciousness.

If modernists considered it their main task to support the skeleton of the collapsing culture of Western society at all costs, then postmodernists, on the contrary, often gladly accept the “death of culture” and take away its “remains” to use as material for their Game. So, Andy Warhol's numerous images of M. Monroe, or Cathy Acker's rewritten "Don Quixote" are an illustration of the postmodernist trend bricolage, which uses particles of old artifacts in the process of creating new, albeit not "original" (since nothing new can be, by definition, the author's task is reduced to a kind of game) - the resulting work blurs the lines both between the old and the new artifact, and between "high" and "low" art.

Summing up the discussion about the origins of postmodernism, the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch writes: "What was developed by modernity in higher esoteric forms, postmodernity carries out on a wide front of everyday reality. This gives the right to call postmodernity an exoteric form of esoteric modernity"

The key concepts used by the theorists of postmodernism in literature are "world as chaos", "world as text", "intertextualism", "double code", "author's mask", "parodic mode of narration", "failure of communication", "fragmentation". narration", "metaraskazka", etc. Postmodernists claim a "new vision of the world", a new understanding and image of it. The theoretical foundations of poststructuralism are, in particular, a structuralist-deconstructivist complex of ideas and attitudes. Among the techniques used by postmodernists, the following should be mentioned: refusal to imitate reality in images (generally accepted is associated with the familiar, and is a great delusion of mankind) in favor of the Game with form, conventions and symbols from the arsenal of "high art"; cessation of the pursuit of originality: in the age of mass production, any originality instantly loses its freshness and meaning; refusal to use the plot and character of the character in order to convey the meaning of the work; and, finally, the rejection of meaning as such - since all meanings are illusory and deceptive. Modernism, having created a historical background for the current under discussion, later began to degenerate into absurdism, one of the manifestations of which is considered "black humor". Since the postmodernist's approach to the perception of reality is synthetic, postmodernists used the achievements of a variety of artistic methods for their own purposes. Thus, an ironic attitude to everything, without exception, saves postmodernists, as once romantics, from fixing on something unchanging, solid. They, like the existentialists, put the individual above the universal, and the individual above the system. As John Barth, one of the theorists and practitioners of postmodernism, wrote, "the main feature of postmodernism is the global assertion of human rights, which are more important than any interests of the state." Postmodernists protest against totalitarianism, narrow ideologies, globalization, logocentrism, and dogmatism. They are principled pluralists, who are characterized by doubt in everything, the absence of firm decisions, since they associate many variants of the latter.

Based on this, postmodernists do not consider their theories as final. Unlike modernists, they never rejected the old, classical literature, but actively included its methods, themes, images in their works. True, often, although not always, with irony.

One of the main methods of postmodernism is intertextuality. On the basis of other texts, quotes from them, borrowed images, a postmodernist text is created. Related to this is the so-called "postmodern sensibility" - one of the foundations of the aesthetics of postmodernism. Sensitivity not so much to life phenomena as to other texts. The postmodern method of "double code" is associated with texts - mixing, comparing two or more textual worlds, while texts can be used in a parodic way. One of the forms of parody among postmodernists is pbstish (from the Italian Pasticcio) - a mixture of texts or excerpts from them, potpourri. The original meaning of the word is an opera from fragments of other operas. The positive aspect of this is that postmodernists are reviving obsolete artistic methods - baroque, gothic, but their irony, their boundless doubt prevails over everything.

Postmodernists claim not only to develop new methods of artistic creation, but also to create a new philosophy. Postmodernists talk about the existence of a "special postmodern sensibility" and a specific postmodern mentality. At present, in the West, postmodernism is understood as an expression of the spirit of the era in all areas of human activity - art, literature, philosophy, science, politics. Postmodernist criticism is subjected to traditional logocentrism and normativity. The use of concepts from various fields of human activity, the mixing of literary themes and images are characteristic features of poststructuralism. Postmodernist writers and poets often act as literary theorists, and literary theorists sharply criticize theories as such, opposing them to "poetic thinking."

The artistic practice of postmodernism is characterized by such stylistic features as a conscious focus on eclecticism, mosaicism, irony, playful style, parodic rethinking of traditions, rejection of the division of art into elite and mass, overcoming the boundary between art and everyday life. If the modernists did not claim to create a new philosophy, and even more so - a new worldview, then postmodernism is incomparably more ambitious. Postmodernists are not limited to experiments in the field of artistic creativity. Postmodernism is a complex, multifaceted, dynamically developing complex of philosophical, scientific-theoretical and emotional-aesthetic ideas about literature and life. The most illustrative areas of its application are artistic creation and literary criticism, the latter often being an integral part of the fabric of a work of art, i.e. a postmodernist writer often analyzes both the works of other authors and his own, and often this is done with self-irony. In general, irony and self-irony are one of the favorite techniques of postmodernism, because for them there is nothing solid, deserving the respect and self-respect that was inherent in people of previous centuries. In the irony of postmodernists, some features of the self-irony of romantics and the modern understanding of the personality of a person by existentialists, who believe that human life is absurd, manifest themselves. In the postmodern novels of J. Fowles, J. Bart, A. Rob-Trieux, Ent. Burgess and others, we meet not only a description of events and characters, but also lengthy discussions about the very process of writing this work, theoretical reasoning and self-mockery (as, for example, in the novels "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, "Paper People" William Golding).

Introducing theoretical passages into the fabric of a work, postmodern writers often directly appeal to the authority of structuralists, semiotics, and deconstructivists, in particular, mentioning Rolland Barthes or Jacques Derride. This mixture of literary theorizing and artistic fiction is also explained by the fact that writers are trying to "educate" the reader, declaring that under the new conditions it is no longer possible and stupid to write in the old way. The "new conditions" presuppose the breaking of the old positivist causal ideas about the world in general and about literature in particular. Through the efforts of postmodernists, literature acquires an essayistic character.

Many postmodernists, in particular, the writer John Fowles and the theorist Rolland Barth, are characterized by a tendency to pose political and social problems, as well as a sharp criticism of bourgeois civilization with its rationalism and logocentrism (R. Barth's book "Mythologies", in which modern bourgeois " myths", i.e. ideology). Rejecting the logocentrism of the bourgeoisie, as well as all bourgeois civilization and politics, postmodernists oppose to it the "politics of language games" and "linguistic" or "textual" consciousness, free from all external frameworks.

In a broader worldview, postmodernists talk not only about the dangers of any kind of restrictions, in particular, about logocentrism that "narrows" the world, but also about the fact that a person is not the center of the cosmos, as, for example, the Enlighteners believed. Postmodernists oppose and prefer chaos to space, and this preference is expressed, in particular, in the fundamentally chaotic construction of the work. The only specific given for them is the text, which allows you to enter any arbitrary values. It is in this connection that they speak of the "authority of writing", preferring it to the authority of logic and normativity. For postmodernist theorists, in essence, an anti-realistic tendency is characteristic, while postmodernist writers widely use realistic methods of depiction along with postmodernist ones.

Especially important in the aesthetics and practice of postmodernists are the problems of the author and the reader. The postmodernist author invites the reader to be an interlocutor. They may even parse the text along with the intended reader. The author-narrator strives to make the reader feel like his interlocutor. At the same time, some postmodernists tend to use tape recordings for this, and not just text. Thus, John Bart's novel "The One Who Lost in the Fun Room" is preceded by the subtitle: "Prose for Print, Tape Recorder and Live Voice". In the afterword, J. Barth talks about the desirability of using additional channels of communication (except for printed text) for an adequate and deeper understanding of the work. That is, he seeks to connect oral and written speech.

A postmodernist writer is prone to experimentation in written speech, to revealing its hidden communicative possibilities. The written word, which is only a "trace" of the signified, is inherent in polysemy and semantic elusiveness, therefore it contains in itself the potential opportunity to enter into the most diverse semantic chains and go beyond the traditional linear text. Hence the desire to use a non-linear organization of the text. Postmodernism uses the polyvariance of plot situations, the interchangeability of episodes, using associative rather than linear logical-temporal connections. He can also use the graphic potential of the text, combining texts of different style and semantic load, printed in different fonts, within the same discourse.

Writers - postmodernists have developed a whole range of artistic means of depiction. These techniques are based on the desire to depict the real world as little as possible, to replace it with a text world. At the same time, they rely on the teachings of J. Lacon and J. Derrida, who pointed out that the signifier can only be a "trace" of a real object or even an indication of its absence. In this regard, they said that between reading a word and imagining what it means, there is a certain time gap, i.e. we first perceive the word itself as such, and only after some, albeit a short time, what this word means. This cult of the signifier, of the word, is deliberately directed by the postmodernists against the aesthetics and literature of the realists. And even against the modernists, who did not renounce reality, but spoke only about new ways of modeling it. Even the surrealists considered themselves the builders of a new world, not to mention the brave futurists, who aspired to be "sumps" and "water carriers" of this new world. For postmodernists, however, literature and the text are an end in itself. They have a cult of the text itself, or, one might say, of "signifiers" who are torn away from their signifieds.

One of the most important methods of postmodern writing is defined by theorists as "non-selection", i.e. arbitrariness and fragmentation in the selection and use of material. With this technique, postmodernists seek to create an artistic effect of unintended narrative chaos, corresponding to the chaos of the external world. The latter is perceived by postmodernists as meaningless, alienated, torn and disordered. This technique is reminiscent of surrealist methods of writing. However, as already noted, the surrealists still had faith, albeit illusory, in the possibility of changing the world. The artistic techniques of postmodernists are aimed at dismantling traditional narrative connections within the work. They deny the usual principles of its organization inherent in realists.

The style and grammar of the postmodern text are characterized by the following features, called "forms of fragmentary discourse":

1. Violation of grammatical norms - the sentence, in particular, may not be fully completed (ellipse, aposiopesis);

2. Semantic incompatibility of elements of the text, combining incompatible details into a common one (merging tragedy and farce, posing important problems and all-encompassing irony);

3. unusual typographic design of the proposal;

However, despite the fundamental fragmentation, postmodern texts still have a "content center", which, as a rule, is the image of the author, more precisely, the "mask of the author". The task of such an author is to set up and direct the reactions of the "implicit" reader in the right perspective. The whole communicative situation of postmodern works rests on this. Without this center, there would be no communication. It would be a complete communication failure. In essence, the "mask" of the author is the only living, real hero in a postmodernist work. The fact is that other characters are usually just puppets of the author's ideas, devoid of flesh and blood. The desire of the author to enter into a direct dialogue with the reader, up to the use of audio equipment, can be regarded as a fear that the reader will not understand the work. And writers - postmodernists take the trouble to interpret their work to readers. Thus, they act in two roles at once - the artist of the word and the critic.

From what has been said above, it is obvious that postmodernism is not only a purely literary, but also a sociological phenomenon. It has developed as a result of a complex of reasons, including technological progress in the field of communication, undoubtedly affecting the formation of mass consciousness. Postmodernists take part in this formation.

It is also obvious that postmodernists wittingly or unwittingly seek to blur the line between high and mass culture. At the same time, their works are nevertheless oriented towards a reader of high artistic culture, because one of the main techniques of postmodernism is the technique of literary allusion, association, paradox, and various kinds of collages. Postmodernists also use the technique of "shock therapy", aimed at destroying the habitual norms of the reader's perception, which was formed by cultural tradition: the fusion of tragedy and farce, posing important problems and all-encompassing irony.

Conclusions to Chapter 1

The characteristic features of postmodernism as a literary movement are the following features:

· citation. everything has already been said, so nothing new can be by definition. The author's task is reduced to a play of images, forms and meanings.

· context and intertextuality. " The ideal reader" should be well erudite. He should be familiar with the context and capture all the connotations embedded in the text by the author.

· text layering. The text consists of several layers of meanings. Depending on their own erudition, the reader may be able to read information from one or more layers of meaning. From this follows the focus on the widest possible range of readers - everyone in the text will be able to find something for themselves.

· rejection of logocentricity; virtuality. There is no truth, what is taken for it by human consciousness is only truth, which is always relative. The same characterizes reality: the absence of objective reality in the presence of many subjective worldviews. (It is worth recalling the fact that postmodernism flourished in the era of virtual realities).

· irony. Since truth has been abandoned, everything must be treated with humor, for nothing is perfect.

· text-centric: everything is perceived as a text, as a kind of coded message that can be read. From this it follows that the object of attention of postmodernism can be any sphere of life.

Thus, Friedrich Schlegel ("On the Study of Greek Poetry") states that "the unconditional maximum of negation, or absolute nothingness, can be given in any representation to the same small extent as the absolute maximum of affirmation; even at the highest level of the ugly, there is something else beautiful."

The true world of postmodernism is a labyrinth and twilight, a mirror and obscurity, simplicity that makes no sense. The law that determines the relationship of a person to the world should be the law of the hierarchy of the permissible, the essence of which is the instantaneous explanation of the truth based on intuition, which is elevated to the rank of the basic principle of ethics. Postmodernism has not yet said its final word.

Postmodernism entered the literary scene as a ready-made trend, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and currents: conceptualism and neo-baroque.

Conceptualism or social art.

Conceptualism, or sots art- this trend consistently expands the postmodernist picture of the world, involving more and more new cultural languages (from socialist realism to various classical trends, etc.). Intertwining and comparing authoritative languages with marginal ones (obscenities, for example), sacred with profane, semi-official with rebellious ones, conceptualism reveals the closeness of various myths of cultural consciousness, equally destroying reality, replacing it with a set of fictions and at the same time totalitarianly imposing on the reader their idea of the world, truth, ideal. Conceptualism is mainly focused on rethinking the languages of power (be it the language of political power, that is, social realism, or the language of a morally 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 Baitov, 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, outlined the main features of this movement:

aesthetics of repetition: dialectics of the unique and repeatable - polycentrism, regulated irregularity, ragged rhythm (thematically beaten in "Moscow-Petushki" and "Pushkin House", the poetic systems of Rubinstein and Kibirov are built on these principles);

aesthetics of excess- experiments on stretching boundaries to the last limits, monstrosity (corporality of Aksenov, Aleshkovsky, monstrosity of characters and, above all, the narrator in Sasha Sokolov's "Palisandria");

shifting emphasis from the whole to a detail and / or fragment: redundancy of details, "in which the detail actually becomes a system" (Sokolov, Tolstaya);

randomness, discontinuity, irregularity as the dominant compositional principles, combining unequal and heterogeneous texts into a single metatext (“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.).

unresolvability of collisions(forming, in turn, a system of "knots" and "mazes"): the pleasure of resolving the conflict, 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 the complete rejection of the old, the creation of the new at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dissipation of the solid meanings of any phenomenon. The center of any system is a fiction, the authority of power is eliminated, the center depends on various factors.

Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, reality disappears under a stream of simulacra (Deleuze). The world turns into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or by other people.

Some works of postmodernism are characterized by a rhizomatic structure, where there are no oppositions, no beginning and no end.

The main concepts of postmodernism also include remake and narrative. A remake is a new version of an already written work (cf.: texts by Furmanov and Pelevin). 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.

M. Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodern principle of paralogy and on the concept of “paralogy”, highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western. Paralogy is “contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of intelligence as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of a binary situation, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of some one beginning, moreover, the possibility of the existence of an opposing one is recognized. The paralogic lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously, interact, but at the same time, the existence of a compromise between them is completely excluded. From this point of view, Russian postmodernism differs from Western:

focusing precisely on the search for compromises and dialogic interfaces between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a “meeting point” between the fundamentally incompatible in classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.

at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally “paralogical”, they retain an explosive character, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to contradictory integrity.

In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation - Integrity according to the definition of M. Lipovetsky: “... 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 some “non-classical” models of integrity.”

The category of Emptiness also acquires a different direction in Russian postmodernism. According to V. Pelevin, emptiness “does not reflect anything, and therefore nothing can be destined on it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, and so much so that no tool that has entered into a confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Due to this, Pelevin's emptiness has ontological supremacy over everything else and is an independent value. Emptiness will always remain Emptiness.

Opposition Personal - Impersonal is realized in practice as a person in the form of a changeable fluid integrity.

Memory - Oblivion- directly from A. Bitov is realized in the provision on culture: "... in order to save - it is necessary to forget."

A classic version of a borderline subject floating between diametrical cultural codes. So, for example, Venichka in the poem "Moscow - Petushki" tries, being already 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. The hero of Sasha Sokolov is divided in half from time to time, also standing in the center of cultural codes, but without dwelling on any of them, but as if passing their flow through him. 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, the society, in the human mind that all kinds of cultural codes intersect, forming an unpredictable mosaic.

At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism, which has reached out from Rozanov and Kharms to the present.

Russian postmodernism also has several options for saturating the artistic space. Here are some of them.

For example, a work can be based on a rich state of culture, which largely 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).

Postmodernism

The end of World War II marked an important turn in the worldview of Western civilization. The war was not only a clash of states, but also a clash of ideas, each of which promised to make the world perfect, and in return brought rivers of blood. Hence - the feeling of the crisis of the idea, that is, disbelief in the possibility of any idea to make the world a better place. There was also a crisis of the idea of art. On the other hand, the number of literary works has reached such a quantity that it seems that everything has already been written, each text contains links to previous texts, that is, it is a metatext.

In the course of the development of the literary process, the gap between the elite and pop culture became too deep, the phenomenon of “works for philologists” appeared, to read and understand which you need to have a very good philological education. Postmodernism has become a reaction to this split, connecting both areas of the multi-layered work. For example, Suskind's "Perfumer" can be read as a detective story, or maybe as a philosophical novel that reveals the issues of genius, artist and art.

Modernism, which explored the world as the realization of certain absolutes, eternal truths, gave way to postmodernism, for which the whole world is a game without a happy ending. As a philosophical category, the term "postmodernism" has spread thanks to the works of the philosophers Zhe. Derrida, J. Bataille, M. Foucault and especially the book of the French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979).

The principles of repetition and compatibility are transformed into a style of artistic thinking with its inherent features of eclecticism, a tendency to stylization, quoting, rewriting, reminiscences, allusions. The artist does not deal with "pure" material, but with culturally assimilated, because the existence of art in the previous classical forms is impossible in a post-industrial society with its unlimited potential for serial reproduction and replication.

The Encyclopedia of Literary Movements and Currents provides the following list of features of postmodernism:

1. The cult of an independent personality.

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

3. The desire to combine, mutually supplement the truths (sometimes polar opposites) of many people, nations, cultures, religions, philosophies, the vision of everyday real life as a theater of the absurd, an apocalyptic carnival.

4. The use of an emphatically playful style to emphasize the abnormality, non-authenticity, anti-naturalness of the way of life prevailing in reality.

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

6. A mixture of many traditional genre varieties.

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

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

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

10. Irony and parody.

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

Postmodernism develops in the genres of fantastic parables, confessional novels, dystopias, short stories, mythological novels, socio-philosophical and socio-psychological novels, etc. Genre forms can be combined, opening up new artistic structures.

Günter Grass (The Tin Drum, 1959) is considered the first postmodernist. Outstanding representatives of postmodern literature: V. Eco, H.-L. Borges, M. Pavic, M. Kundera, P. Suskind, V. Pelevin, I. Brodsky, F. Begbeder.

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

In the pre-war period, existentialism arose, and after the Second World War, existentialism was actively developing. Existentialism (lat. existentiel - existence) is a direction in philosophy and a current of modernism, in which the source of a work of art is the artist himself, expressing the life of the individual, creating an artistic reality that reveals the secret of being in general. The sources of existentialism were contained in the writings of the German thinker of the 19th century. From Kierkegaard.

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

Existentialism is spreading in French (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre and others), German (E. Nossak, A. Döblin), English (A. Murdoch, V. Golding), Spanish (M. de Unamuno), American (N. Mailer, J. Baldwin), Japanese (Kobo Abe) literature.

In the second half of the XX century. a “new novel” (“anti-novel”) is developing - a genre equivalent of the French modern novel of the 1940s-1970s, which arises as a denial of existentialism. Representatives of this genre are N. Sarrot, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor, K. Simon and others.

A significant phenomenon of the theatrical avant-garde of the second half of the XX century. is the so-called theater of the absurd. The dramaturgy of this direction is characterized by the absence of a place and time of action, the destruction of the plot and composition, irrationalism, paradoxical collisions, an alloy of the tragic and the comic. The most talented representatives of the "theater of the absurd" are S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, E. Albee, G. Frisch and others.

A notable phenomenon in the world process of the second half of the XX century. became "magical realism" - a direction in which elements of the real and the imaginary, the real and the fantastic, the everyday and the mythological, the probable and the mysterious, everyday life and eternity are organically combined. It acquired the greatest development in Latin American literature (A. Karpent "єp, J. Amado, G. Garcia Marquez, G. Vargas Llosa, M. Asturias, etc.). A special role in the work of these authors is played by the myth, which is the basis of the work. A classic example of magical realism is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by G. Garcia Marquez (1967), where the history of Colombia and all of Latin America is recreated in mythical-real images.

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

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

Postmodernism was widely discussed in the West in the early 1980s. Some researchers consider Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake" (1939) to be the beginning of postmodernism, others - Joyce's preliminary novel "Ulysses", still others - American "new poetry" of the 1940s and 1950s, others think that postmodernism is not a fixed chronological phenomenon, and the spiritual state and “every epoch has its own postmodernism” (Eko), the fifth generally speak of postmodernism as “one of the intellectual fictions of our time” (Yu. Andrukhovych). However, most scholars believe that the transition from modernism to postmodernism took place in the mid-1950s. In the 60s and 70s, postmodernism covered various national literatures, and in the 80s it became the dominant trend in modern literature and culture.

The first manifestations of postmodernism can be considered such trends as the American school of "black humor" (W. Burroughs, D. Wart, D. Barthelm, D. Donlivy, K. Kesey, K. Vonnegut, D. Heller, etc.), the French "new novel" (A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarrot, M. Butor, K. Simon, etc.), "theater of the absurd" (E. Ionesco, S. Beckett, J. Gonit, F. Arrabal, etc.) .

The most prominent postmodern writers include the English John Fowles ("The Collector", "The French Lieutenant's Woman"), Julian Barnes ("A History of the World in Nine and a Half Chapters") and Peter Ackroyd ("Milton in America"), the German Patrick Suskind (" Perfumer"), Austrian Karl Ransmayr ("The Last World"), Italians Italo Calvino ("Slowness") and Umberto Eco ("The Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum"), Americans Thomas Pinchon ("Entropy", "For Sale No. 49" ) and Vladimir Nabokov (English-language novels Pale Fire and others), Argentines Jorge Luis Borges (short stories and essays) and Julio Cortazar (The Hopscotch Game).

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

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

Postmodernism claims to express the general theoretical "superstructure" of contemporary art, philosophy, science, politics, economics, and fashion. Today they talk not only about “postmodern creativity”, but also about “postmodern consciousness”, “postmodern mentality”, “postmodern mentality”, etc.

Postmodern creativity involves aesthetic pluralism at all levels (plot, composition, figurative, characterological, chronotopic, etc.), completeness of presentation without evaluation, reading the text in a cultural context, co-creation of the reader and the writer, mythological thinking, a combination of historical and timeless categories, dialogue , irony.

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

Total irony reigns in postmodernism, general ridicule and ridicule from all over. Numerous postmodern works of art are characterized by a conscious attitude towards an ironic juxtaposition of various genres, styles, and artistic movements. A work of postmodernism is always a mockery of previous and unacceptable forms of aesthetic experience: realism, modernism, mass culture. Thus, irony defeats the serious modernist tragedy inherent, for example, in the works of F. Kafka.

One of the main principles of postmodernism is quotation, and representatives of this trend are characterized by quotation thinking. The American researcher B. Morrissett called postmodern prose "citation literature". The total postmodern quotation comes to replace the elegant modernist reminiscence. Quite postmodern is an American student joke about how a philology student read Hamlet for the first time and was disappointed: nothing special, a collection of common catchwords and expressions. Some works of postmodernism turn into quotation books. So, the novel by the French writer Jacques Rivet "The Young Ladies from A." is a collection of 750 quotations from 408 authors.

Such a concept as intertextuality is also associated with postmodern quotation thinking. The French researcher Julia Kristeva, who introduces this term into literary criticism, noted: “Any text is built as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text.” The French semiotician Roland Karaulov wrote: “Each text is an intertext; other texts are present in it at various levels in more or less recognizable forms: texts of the previous culture and texts of the surrounding culture. Each text is a new fabric woven from old quotations.” Intertext in the art of postmodernism is the main way of constructing a text and consists in the fact that the text is built from quotations from other texts.

If numerous modernist novels were also intertextual (Ulysses by J. Joyce, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, T. Mann's Doctor Faustus, G. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game) and even realistic works (as Y. Tynyanov proved, Dostoevsky's novel "The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants" is a parody of Gogol and his works), it is the achievement of postmodernism with hypertext. This is a text constructed in such a way that it turns into a system, a hierarchy of texts, at the same time constituting a unity and a multitude of texts. Its example is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each entry refers to other entries in the same edition. You can read such text in an equal way: from one article to another, ignoring hypertext links; read all the articles in a row or moving from one link to another, carrying out "hypertext navigation". Therefore, such a flexible device as hypertext can be manipulated at one's own discretion. In 1976, the American writer Raymond Federman published a novel, which is called “At Your Discretion”. It can be read at the request of the reader, from any place, shuffling unnumbered and bound pages. The concept of hypertext is also associated with computer virtual realities. Today's hypertexts are computer literature that can only be read on a monitor: by pressing one key, you are transported to the hero's backstory, by pressing another, you change the bad ending to a good one, etc.

A sign of postmodern literature is the so-called pastish (from Italian pasbiccio - an opera composed of excerpts from other operas, a mixture, potpourri, stylization). It is a specific variant of parody, which changes its functions in postmodernism. Pastish differs from parody in that now there is nothing to parody, there is no serious object that can be ridiculed. O. M. Freudenberg wrote that only that which is “living and holy” can be parodied. For a day of non-postmodernism, nothing "lives", and even more so nothing is "holy". Pastish is also understood as parody.

Postmodern art is by its nature fragmentary, discrete, eclectic. Hence such a feature of it as a collage. Postmodern collage may seem like a new form of modernist montage, but it differs significantly from it. In modernism, montage, although it was composed of incomparable images, was nevertheless united into a whole by the unity of style and technique. In the postmodern collage, on the contrary, various fragments of the collected objects remain unchanged, not transformed into a single whole, each of them retains its isolation.

Important for postmodernism with the principle of the game. Classical moral and ethical values are translated into a playful plane, as M. Ignatenko notes, “yesterday’s classical culture and spiritual values live dead in postmodernity - its era does not live with them, it plays with them, it plays with them, it plays with them.”

Other characteristics of postmodernism include uncertainty, decanonization, carialization, theatricality, hybridization of genres, co-creation of the reader, saturation with cultural realities, “dissolution of character” (complete destruction of the character as a psychologically and socially determined character), attitude to literature as to the “first reality” (text does not reflect reality, but creates a new reality, even many realities, often independent of each other). And the most common images-metaphors of postmodernism are centaur, carnival, labyrinth, library, madness.

A phenomenon of modern literature and culture is also multiculturalism, through which the multi-component American nation has naturally realized the unsteady uncertainty of postmodernism. A more "earthed" multicult) previously "voiced" thousands of equal, unique living American voices of representatives of various racial, ethnic, gender, local and other specific streams. The literature of multiculturalism includes African-American, Indian, Chicano (Mexicans and other Latin Americans, a significant number of whom live in the United States), literature of various ethnic groups inhabiting America (including Ukrainians), American descendants of Asians, Europeans, literature of minorities of all stripes .