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Nina Berberova once remarked: “Nabokov not only writes in a new way, he also teaches how to read in a new way. He creates his reader. In the article “About good readers and good writers" Nabokov sets out his view on this problem.

“We should remember that a work of art is always the creation of a new world, and therefore, first of all, we must try to understand this world as fully as possible in all its burning newness, as having no connections with the worlds already known to us. And only after it has been studied in detail - only after that! - you can look for its connection with other artistic worlds and other areas of knowledge.

(...) The art of writing turns into an empty exercise if it is not, first of all, the art of seeing life through the prism of fiction. (...) The writer not only organizes the external side of life, but melts every atom of it.”

Nabokov believed that the reader must have imagination, good memory, sense of words and, most importantly, artistic flair.

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be viewed: as a storyteller, a teacher and a magician. A great writer has all three qualities, but the magician predominates in him, and this is what makes him a great writer.

The narrator simply entertains us, excites the mind and feelings, gives us the opportunity to make a long journey without spending too much time on it. A somewhat different, although not necessarily deeper, mind seeks in the artist a teacher - a propagandist, a moralist, a prophet (precisely this sequence). In addition, you can turn to a teacher not only for moral teachings, but also for knowledge and facts. (..) But first of all, a great artist is always a great magician, and this is precisely where the most exciting moment for the reader lies: in the feeling of the magic of great art created by a genius, in the desire to understand the originality of his style, imagery, the structure of his novels or poems.”

Section XIII. Literature of recent decades

Lesson 62 (123). Literature at the present stage Lesson objectives:

give an overview of works of recent years; teacher lecture; discussion of essays;

conversation on the works read.

During the classesI

.

Reading and discussion of 2-3 essays II. Teacher lecture The modern literary process is characterized by the disappearance of former canonized themes (“the theme of the working class,” “the theme of the army,” etc.) and a sharp rise in the role of everyday relationships. Attention to everyday life, sometimes absurd, to experience

human soul , forced to survive in a situation of disruption and shifts in society, gives rise to special plots. Many writers seem to want to get rid of their former pathos, rhetoric, and preaching, and fall into the aesthetics of “shocking and shock.” The realistic branch of literature, having experienced a state of lack of demand, is approaching the understanding of the turning point in the sphere of moral values. “Literature about literature,” memoir prose, is coming to a prominent place.

“Perestroika” opened the doors to a huge flow of “detainees” and young writers, professing different aesthetics: naturalistic, avant-garde, postmodern, realistic.

One of the ways to update realism is to try to free it from ideological predetermination. This trend led to a new round of naturalism: it combined the traditional belief in the cleansing power of the cruel truth about society and the rejection of any kind of pathos, ideology, preaching (prose by S. Kaledin “The Humble Cemetery”, “Building Battalion”; prose and dramaturgy by L. Petrushevskaya) . 1987 has special meaning

With the republication of works by Mikhail Bulgakov (“Heart of a Dog”, “Crimson Island”), Andrei Platonov (“Chevengur”, “Pit”, “Juvenile Sea”), Boris Pasternak (“Doctor Zhivago”), Anna Akhmatova (“Requiem”), Osip Mandelstam (“Voronezh Notebooks”), the creative heritage of these (famous even before 1987) writers was restored in full.

The next two years - 1989-1990 - are a time of active return of an entire literary system - the literature of Russian abroad.

Until 1989, sporadic republications by emigrant writers - Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov in 1987 - were sensational. And in 1989-1990, “a crowd of shadows poured into Russia from France and America” (E. Etkind) - these are Vasily Aksenov, Georgy Vladimov, Vladimir Voinovich, Sergei Dovlatov, Naum Korzhavin, Viktor Nekrasov, Sasha Sokolov and, of course, Alexander Solzhenitsyn .

The state of contemporary literature itself, that is, that which was not only published, but also written in the second half of the 1980s, confirms that during this period literature was primarily a civil matter. Only ironist poets and authors of “physiological stories” (“Guignol prose” (Sl.)) were able to loudly declare themselves at this time) Leonid Gabyshev (“Odlyan, or the Air of Freedom”) and Sergei Kaledin (“Stroibat”), in whose The works depicted the dark sides of modern life - the morals of juvenile delinquents or army hazing.

It should also be noted that the publication of stories by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Evgeniy Popov, Tatiana Tolstoy, authors who today define the face of modern literature, went almost unnoticed in 1987. In that literary situation, as Andrei Sinyavsky rightly noted, these were “artistically redundant texts.”

So, 1987-1990 is the time when Mikhail Bulgakov’s prophecy (“Manuscripts don’t burn”) came true and the program so carefully outlined by academician Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev was fulfilled: “And if we publish the unpublished works of Andrei Platonov “Chevengur” and “The Pit” , some still remaining in the archives works of Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Zoshchenko, then this, it seems to me, will also be useful for our culture” (from the article: The culture of truth is the anticulture of lies // Literary newspaper, 1987. No. 1). Over the course of four years, the general Russian reader has mastered a colossal array - 2/3 of the previously unknown and inaccessible corpus of Russian literature; all citizens became readers. “The country has turned into an All-Union Reading Room, in which, following Doctor Zhivago, Life and Fate is discussed (Natalya Ivanova). These years are called the “reading feast” years;

There was an unprecedented and unique increase in the circulation of periodical literary publications (“thick” literary magazines). Record circulation of the magazine “New World” (1990) - 2,710,000 copies. (in 1999 - 15,000 copies, i.e. slightly more than 0.5%); all writers became citizens (in 1989, the overwhelming majority of people and deputies from creative unions were writers - V. Astafiev, V. Bykov, O. Gonchar, S. Zalygin, L. Leonov, V. Rasputin); civil (“severe”, not “graceful”) literature triumphs.

Its culmination is 1990 - the “year of Solzhenitsyn” and the year of one of the most sensational publications of the 1990s - the article “Wake of Soviet Literature”, in which its author, a representative of the “new literature”, Viktor Erofeev, declared the end of the “Solzhenization” of Russian literature and the beginning of the next period in modern Russian literature - postmodernist (1991-1994). Postmodernism appeared in the mid-40s, but was recognized as a phenomenon of Western culture, as a phenomenon in literature, art, and philosophy only in the early 80s. Postmodernism is characterized by an understanding of the world as chaos, the world as a text, an awareness of the fragmentation of existence. One of the main principles of postmodernism is intertextuality (the correlation of the text with other literary sources). The postmodern text forms a new type of relationship between literature and the reader. The reader becomes a co-author of the text. Perception

artistic values

In the last third of the twentieth century, postmodernism became widespread in our country.

These are works by Andrei Bitov, Venedikt Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, Tatyana Tolstoy, Joseph Brodsky and some other authors. The system of values ​​is being revised, mythologies are being destroyed, the writers' views are often ironic and paradoxical.

Changes in political, economic, and social conditions in the country at the end of the twentieth century led to many changes in literary and near-literary processes. In particular, since the 1990s, the Booker Prize appeared in Russia. Its founder is the English Booker company, which is engaged in the production of food products and their wholesale.

The Russian Booker Literary Prize was established by the founder of the Booker Prize in the UK, Booker Pic, in 1992 as a tool to support authors writing in Russian and to revive publishing activity in Russia with the goal of making good contemporary Russian literature commercially successful in its homeland. From a letter from the Chairman of the Booker Committee, Sir Michael Caine:“The success of the Booker Prize, with its annual change of committee, independence from the interests of publishers and from government agencies, prompted us to establish similar awards for works in other languages. The most tempting idea seemed to be to create a Booker Prize for best novel

Russian bookers were Mark Kharitonov (1992, “Lines of Fate, or Milashevich’s Chest”), Vladimir Makanin (1993, “A table covered with cloth and with a decanter in the middle”), Bulat Okudzhava (1994, “The Abolished Theater”), Georgy Vladimov (1995 , “The General and His Army”), Andrei Sergeev (1996, “Album of the Day of Stamps”), Anatoly Azolsky (1997, “The Cage”), Alexander Morozov (1998, “Other People’s Letters”), Mikhail Butov (1999, “Freedom” ), Mikhail Shishkin (2000, “The Taking of Izmail”), Lyudmila Ulitskaya (2001, “The Case of Kukotsky”), Oleg Pavlov (2002, “Karaganda destinies, or the Tale last days"). It should be understood that the Booker Prize, like any other literary prize, is not intended to answer the question “Who is your first, second, third writer?” or “Which novel is the best?” Literary awards are a civilized way to arouse publishing and reader interest (“To bring together readers, writers, publishers. So that books are bought, so that literary work is respected and even generates income. For the writer, for publishers. And in general, culture wins” (critic Sergei Reingold) ).

Close attention to the Booker laureates already in 1992 made it possible to identify two aesthetic trends in the latest Russian literature - postmodernism (among the 1992 finalists are Mark Kharitonov and Vladimir Sorokin) and post-realism (postrealism is a trend in the latest Russian prose). Characteristic of realism is the traditional attention to the fate of a private person, tragically lonely and trying to self-determinate (Vladimir Makanin and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya).

Nevertheless, the Booker Prize and the literary prizes that followed it (Anti-Booker, Triumph, Pushkin Prize, Paris Prize for Russian Poet) did not completely eliminate the problem of confrontation between non-commercial literature (“pure art”) and the market. “The way out of the impasse” (that was the title of an article by critic and cultural critic Alexander Genis, dedicated to the literary situation of the early 1990s) for “non-market” literature was its appeal to traditionally mass genres (literary, even song) -

Fantasy (“fantasy”) - “The Life of Insects” (1993) by Victor Pelevin;

Fantastic novel - “Cassandra’s Brand” (1994) by Chingiz Aitmatov;

Mystic-political thriller - “The Guard” (1993) by Anatoly Kurchatkin;

Erotic novel - “Eron” (1994) by Anatoly Korolev, “Road to Rome” by Nikolai Klimontovich, “Everyday Life of a Harem” (1994) by Valery Popov;

Eastern - “We can do anything” (1994) by Alexander Chernitsky;

An adventurous novel - “I am not me” (1992) by Alexei Slapovsky (and his “rock ballad” “Idol”, “thieves’ romance” “Hook”, “street romance” “Brothers”);

“new detective” by B. Akunin;

“ladies detective” by D. Dontsova, T. Polyakova and others.

A work that embodies almost all the features of modern Russian prose was “Ice” by Vladimir Sorokin. Shortlisted in 2002. The work caused a wide resonance due to the active opposition of the “Walking Together” movement, which accuses Sorokin of pornography. V. Sorokin withdrew his candidacy from the short list.

A consequence of the blurring of the boundaries between high and mass literature (along with the expansion of the genre repertoire) was the final collapse of cultural taboos (prohibitions), including: on the use of obscene (profanity) language - with the publication of Eduard Limonov’s novel “It’s me, Eddie!” (1990), works by Timur Kibirov and Viktor Erofeev; to discuss in literature the problems of drugs (Andrei Salomatov’s novel “Kandinsky Syndrome” (1994)) and sexual minorities (the two-volume collected works of Evgeny Kharitonov “Tears on Flowers” ​​became a sensation in 1993).

From the writer’s program to create a “book for everyone” - both for the traditional consumer of “non-commercial” literature and for the general reading public - a “new fiction” emerges (its formula was proposed by the publisher of the anthology “End of the Century”: “A detective story, but written good language» The tendency of the postmodern period can be considered an emphasis on “readability” and “interestingness”.

The “fantasy” genre, turning out to be the most viable of all genre new formations, was the starting point for one of the most noticeable phenomena in modern Russian literature - this is the prose of fiction, or fiction-prose - fantasy literature, “modern fairy tales”, the authors of which do not reflect, but invent new absolutely implausible artistic realities.

Fiction is literature of the fifth dimension, as the unbridled author's imagination becomes, creating virtual artistic worlds - quasi-geographical and pseudo-historical.

The Literary Festival in Bath, Somerset is one of the most vibrant and authoritative in the UK. Founded in 1995 with the support of The Independent, it has become an important event in European cultural life. The festival's artistic director, Viv Groskop - a journalist, writer and comedian - sums up the unique results of the festival's 20-year activities and names its best books, year after year. By the way, almost all of them have already been filmed.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin, 1995

Louis de Bernier

Many have seen the wonderful film with Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz and think that “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” is a beautiful novel about true love. That's how it is, of course. But also - this is a novel about European history, about how strangely and closely the destinies of nations and people are intertwined: your yesterday's ally shoots you in the back, and your yesterday's enemy saves your life. The plot of the book is based on real historical events, when the Italians, being allies of Nazi Germany, occupied Greece, and then were disarmed and shot by the arriving Germans, who suspected them of “sympathy for the local population.” The Mediterranean charm of the landscapes and characters: the gentle Pelagia and the courageous Captain Corelli, did not leave British festival critics indifferent.

AKA "Grace", 1996

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Booker Prize winner. She dedicated this book to an attempt to unravel a brutal crime that at one time shook up the whole of Canada: on July 23, 1843, the police accused 16-year-old servant Grace Marks of the merciless murder of her master and his pregnant mistress-housekeeper. Grace was extraordinarily beautiful and very young. But she told the police three versions of what happened, and her accomplice two. The accomplice went to the gallows, but Grace's lawyer managed to convince the judges that she was out of her mind. Grace spent 29 years in an insane asylum. Who was she really, and who committed the bloody crime? This is what Margaret Atwood is trying to tell.

American Pastoral, 1997

Philip Roth

What did the American dream ultimately lead to? Which promised wealth, law and order to those who worked hard and behaved well? The main character, Swede Leivow, married the beautiful Miss New Jersey, inherited his father's factory and became the owner of an old mansion in Old Rimrock. It would seem that dreams have come true, but one day the leafy American happiness suddenly turns to dust... And the claims, of course, are not only about the American dream, but about the illusions that feed us modern society generally.

England, England, 1998

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is a witty, ironic Briton who attracts the reader with his difference from others. This book is a kind of satirical utopia, urging people not to confuse the legends of their country’s past with what it is in the present. Nostalgia for a “golden age” that never existed prompted businessman Jack Pitman to create the project “England, England” - a theme park that contains everything that personifies good old England in the eyes of the whole world.

Dishonor, 1999

J.M. Coetzee

South African Coetzee is a two-time Booker Prize winner, a unique case. In 1983, he already received this prize for his novel “The Life and Times of Michael K.” In 2003 Coetzee became a laureate Nobel Prize on literature. The main character of the book, a university professor, due to scandalous story with a student, he loses literally everything: his job, the goodwill of society, and goes to live with his lesbian daughter in a distant province. A polemic novel, Coetzee's answer to the question asked by Franz Kafka: to be or not to be a person, if life has reduced him in the eyes of others to the state of an insect, should he become zero or start from scratch?

White Teeth, 2000

Zadie Smith

People of different races and nationalities, crises of adolescence and midlife, unrequited love and everything in between: a brilliant comic tale that tells about friendship, love, war, an earthquake, three cultures, three families over three generations and one very unusual mouse. Zadie Smith has a sharp tongue: she pokes fun at human stupidity. Raising many problems to the surface, it does not provide answers to questions, but rather invites analysis or confession, recognizing oneself.

Atonement, 2001

Ian McEwan

This book could very well be number one on the list of books with an unusual plot. In pre-war England there lived a rich girl and the son of a gardener, whom she was going to marry. The girl's younger sister dreams of being a writer and practices observing and interpreting human words and actions. And so, in her opinion, her sister’s lover is a dangerous maniac. And when the girls’ cousin turns out to actually be raped by someone, the future writer testifies against her sister’s fiancé. Of course he was innocent. Of course, my sister broke off relations with the entire family. Of course, the youngest of the sisters becomes a writer and, driven by remorse, writes a novel about this story, a novel with a happy ending. But can he change anything?

The Heart of Every Man, 2002

William Boyd

The novel is built in the form of a personal diary of a fictional character - writer Logan Mountstuart. The events of the hero's long life (1906-1991) are woven into the fabric of history: Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Picasso, Hemingway appear in the novel. The hero is casually acquainted with almost all the significant artists and writers of the 20th century: he bows on the streets and talks at parties. But this is not a historical novel; iconic figures are just a background or even a means to show the life of a typical European intellectual from the inside.

The Mysterious Night Murder of a Dog, 2003

Mark Haddon

15-year-old Christopher Boone has autism. He lives in a small town with his father. Then one day someone kills the neighbor's dog, and the boy is the main suspect. To investigate the mysterious murder of an animal, he writes down all the facts, although his father forbids him to interfere in this story. Christopher has a sharp mind, he is good at mathematics, but he understands little in Everyday life. He can't stand being touched, doesn't trust strangers, and never strays from his usual path alone. Christopher does not yet know that the investigation will change his whole life.

Small Island, 2004

Andrea Levy

The novel, set in 1948, touches on themes of empire, prejudice, war and love. This is a kind of comedy of errors played out in 1948. It was then that Andrea Levy's parents came to the UK from Jamaica, and their story formed the basis of the novel. The main character of “Little Island” returns from the war, but peaceful life on the “big” island turns out to be not so easy and cloudless.

Something's Wrong with Kevin, 2005

Lionel Shriver

The book was also translated with the title “The Price of Unlove.” A difficult, difficult book about how to live if your child has committed a terrible crime. What questions should you ask yourself as a parent? What did you miss? There was always something wrong with Kevin, but no one did anything about it.

Road, 2006

Cormac McCarthy

This novel has won many awards: the British James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2006 and the American Pulitzer Prize for art book. A terrible catastrophe has destroyed the United States and an unnamed father and son, still a boy, are moving through the territory ruled by gangs of marauders and cutthroats to the sea.

Half a Yellow Sun, 2007

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The book traces the fates of five main characters: the twin daughters (the beautiful Olanna and the rebel Kainene) of an influential businessman, a professor, his boy servant Ugwu and the British journalist-writer Richard. Each of them has their own plans for the future and dreams that are shattered by the war. The action takes place against the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). Readers called Adichie’s novel “the African Kite Runner,” and British critics awarded it the prestigious Orange Prize.

Outcast, 2008

Sadie Jones

1957 Young Lewis Aldridge returns home after serving two years for a crime that shocked sleepy Surrey. Lewis is destined to go through a path of disappointment and loss, not counting on the support of others, in danger of being broken. And only on the verge of despair will he be given love again, love as salvation...

Little Stranger, 2009

Sarah Waters

The end of the Second World War. England. The previously brilliant family of local landowners fell into decline. The lands are being sold, the farm is unprofitable, the luxurious mansion is falling into disrepair, and its dying destroys the psyche of the remaining inhabitants: an old lady with traces of former greatness, who yearns for her first-born daughter who died in childhood, and her children - an ugly daughter who stayed too long as a girl and a son crippled in the war, on whom all the burdens of the head of a bankrupt family fall. All events are shown through the eyes of a good doctor, whose kindness becomes very doubtful towards the end. There is also a ghost living in the estate.

Wolfhall, 2010

Hilary Mantel

You know the name Cromwell. Just when you think of Oliver Cromwell, the main character in this book, which Viv Groskop, art director of the Bath Literary Festival, calls the best of the twenty, is a guy called Thomas Cromwell. He is the son of a rowdy blacksmith, a political genius whose tools are bribery, threats and flattery. His goal is to transform England in accordance with his will and the desires of the king, whom he faithfully serves, because if Henry VIII dies without leaving an heir, then civil war is inevitable in the country.

Time has the last laugh, 2011

Jennifer Egan

The book “Time Laughs Last” brought the author world fame and the most prestigious literary award in the United States - the Pulitzer Prize. There are many heroes in this book. A whole ball. But the most important, central character is Time. And it has the last laugh. The youth of the heroes coincides with the birth of punk rock, and it forever enters their lives, and for some it becomes a calling. The book itself is structured like a music album: its two parts are called “Side A” and “Side B,” and each of the thirteen independent chapters, like songs, has its own theme. Life is not generous to everyone, but everyone in their own way tries to resist time and remain true to themselves and their dreams.

On the threshold of miracles, 2012

Ann Patchett

A brave and risky girl, Marina Singh, is looking for a miracle, and her sixth sense tells her that it is here, in the vicinity of the Amazon, that she will find what she is looking for. Searches and adventures, and such different versions of the “truth”. Does the heroine have enough strength?

Life after life, 2013

Kate Atkinson

Imagine having the opportunity to live life over and over again until you get it right. main character is born and dies without yet learning to breathe. And then he is born again, survives and tells the story of his life. He talks again and again. Until you manage to live the twentieth century correctly: to escape from the treacherous waves; avoid a fatal disease; find a ball that has rolled into the bushes; learn to shoot so as not to miss the Fuhrer.

Goldfinch, 2014

Donna Tartt

The novel is the winner of numerous literary awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel is named after a painting by the famous Dutch artist Carel Fabritius "The Goldfinch" (1654), which plays an important role in the fate of the main character of the book. Stephen King also expressed admiration for the novel, adding: “There are about five books like The Goldfinch in ten years, no more. It is written with both intelligence and soul. Donna Tartt presented a brilliant novel to the public."

A Brief History of Seven Murders, 2015

Marlon James

On October 13, 2015, Marlon James was named winner of the Booker Prize. James is Jamaica's first representative at the competition. His novel topped the lists all year best books, main characteristic its cinematic storytelling. The book tells the story of the assassination attempts on Bob Marley in the 1970s, uncovered three decades later, involving drug lords, beauty queens, journalists and even the CIA.

From: theindependent.com.uk

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Modern literary process

Literature is an integral part of a person’s life, his unique photograph, which perfectly describes everything internal states, as well as social laws. Like history, literature develops, changes, becomes qualitatively new. Of course, one cannot say that modern literature is better or worse than what came before. She's just different. Now others literary genres, other problems that the author covers are other authors, after all. But whatever one may say, the “Pushkins” and “Turgenevs” are not the same now, this is not the time. Sensitive, always sensitively responding to the mood of the time, Russian literature today reveals a kind of panorama of a divided soul, in which the past and present are intertwined in a bizarre way. Literary process since the 80s. twentieth century, indicated its unconventionality, dissimilarity from the previous stages of development of the artistic word. There's been a change artistic eras, the evolution of the artist’s creative consciousness. At the center of modern books are moral and philosophical problems. The writers themselves, participating in debates about the modern literary process, perhaps agree on one thing: latest literature interesting because it aesthetically reflects our time. So, A. Varlamov writes: " Modern literature, no matter what crisis it may be in, preserves time. This is its purpose, the future - this is its addressee, for the sake of which one can endure the indifference of both the reader and the ruler".P. Aleshkovsky continues the thought of his colleague: " One way or another, literature constructs life. He builds a model, tries to hook and highlight certain types. The plot, as you know, has remained unchanged since ancient times. Overtones are important... There is a writer - and there is Time - something non-existent, elusive, but alive and pulsating - something with which the writer always plays cat and mouse".

Back in the early 80s, two camps of writers took shape in Russian literature: representatives of Soviet literature and representatives of the literature of Russian emigration. It is interesting that with the death of prominent Soviet writers Trifonov, Kataev, Abramov, the camp of Soviet literature has become significantly impoverished. There were no new writers in the Soviet Union. The concentration of a significant part of the creative intelligentsia abroad led to the fact that hundreds of poets, writers, and figures in various fields of culture and art continued to create outside their homeland. And only since 1985, Russian literature, for the first time after a 70-year break, had the opportunity to be a single whole: the literature of Russian emigration from all three waves of Russian emigration merged with it - after the civil war of 1918-1920, after World War II and the Brezhnev era. Returning back, the works of emigration quickly joined the flow of Russian literature and culture. Participants in the literary process were literary texts, which were banned at the time of their writing (the so-called “returned literature”). Domestic literature has been significantly enriched by previously prohibited works, such as A. Platonov’s novels “The Pit” and “Chevengur”, E. Zamyatin’s dystopia “We”, B. Pilnyak’s story “Mahogany”, B. Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”, “ Requiem" and "Poem without a Hero" by A. Akhmatova and many others. “All these authors are united by the pathos of studying the causes and consequences of deep social deformations” (N. Ivanova “Questions of Literature”).

Three main components of the modern literary process can be distinguished: literature of Russian abroad; "returned" literature; actually modern literature. Giving a clear and succinct definition of the last of them is still not an easy task. In modern literature, such movements as avant-garde and post-avant-garde, modern and postmodern, surrealism, impressionism, neosentimentalism, metarealism, social art, conceptualism, etc. have appeared or been revived.

But against the backdrop of postmodernist trends, “classical, traditional” literature continues to exist: neorealists, postrealists, traditionalists not only continue to write, but also actively fight against the “pseudoliterature” of postmodernity. We can say that the entire literary community is divided into those who are “for” and those who are “against” new trends, and literature itself has turned into an arena of struggle between two large blocs - traditionalist writers focusing on the classical understanding artistic creativity, and postmodernists, who hold radically opposing views. This struggle influences both the ideological, content and formal levels of the emerging works.

The complex picture of aesthetic dispersion is complemented by the situation in the field of Russian poetry at the end of the century. It is generally accepted that prose dominates the modern literary process. Poetry bears the same burden of time, the same features of a troubled and scattered era, the same desires to enter new specific zones of creativity. Poetry, more painfully than prose, feels the loss of reader attention and its own role as an emotional stimulant of society.

In the 60-80s, poets entered Soviet literature who brought with them a lot of new things and developed old traditions. The themes of their work are diverse, and their poetry is deeply lyrical and intimate. But the theme of the Motherland has never left the pages of our literature. Her images, associated either with the nature of her native village or with the places where people fought, can be found in almost every work. And each author has his own perception and feeling of the Motherland. We find insightful lines about Russia from Nikolai Rubtsov (1936-1971), who feels like the heir to centuries-old Russian history. Critics believe that the work of this poet combined the traditions of Russian poetry of the 19th-20th centuries - Tyutchev, Fet, Blok, Yesenin.

WITH eternal themes Our contemporaries invariably associate the name of Rasul Gamzatov (1923). Sometimes they say about him that his future path is difficult to predict. He is so unexpected in his work: from winged jokes to the tragic “Cranes”, from the prose “encyclopedia” “My Dagestan” to the aphorisms “Inscriptions on Daggers”. But still it is not difficult to isolate the themes on which his poetry is based. This is devotion to the Motherland , respect for elders, admiration for a woman, a mother, a worthy continuation of the father’s work. Reading the poems of Rubtsov, Gamzatov, and other wonderful poets of our time, you see the enormous life experience of a person who expresses in his poems what is difficult for us to express.

One of the main ideas of modern poetry is citizenship, the main thoughts are conscience and duty. Yevgeny Yevtushenko belongs to the social poets, patriots, and citizens. His work is reflections on his generation, on kindness and malice, on opportunism, cowardice and careerism.

The role of dystopia

Genre diversity and blurred boundaries for a long time did not allow us to detect typological patterns in the evolution of literary genres at the end of the century. However, the second half of the 1990s has already made it possible to observe a certain commonality in the picture of the diffusion of the genres of prose and poetry, in the emergence of innovations in the field of the so-called " new drama"It is obvious that large prose forms have left the stage literary prose, the “credit of trust” in the authoritarian narrative turned out to be lost. First of all, the genre of the novel experienced this. Modifications of his genre changes demonstrated the process of “collapse”, giving way to small genres with their openness to various types of form creation.

Dystopia occupies a special place in genre form-making. Losing its formal, rigid features, it is enriched by new qualities, the main one of which is a unique worldview. Dystopia has had and continues to influence the formation of a special type of artistic thinking, such as a statement based on the “photo negative” principle. The peculiarity of dystopian thought lies in its destructive ability to break the usual patterns of perception of the surrounding life. Aphorisms from the book Vic. Erofeev's "Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul" ironically, "in reverse" formulate this type of relationship between literature and reality: "For a Russian, every day there is an apocalypse," "Our people will live badly, but not for long." Classic examples of dystopia, such as the novel “We” by E. Zamyatin, “Invitation to an Execution” by V. Nabokov, “The Castle” by F. Kafka, “Animal Farm” and “1984” by J. Orwell, at one time played the role of prophecies. Then these books stood on a par with others, and most importantly - with another reality that opened its abysses. “Utopias are terrible because they come true,” N. Berdyaev once wrote. A classic example is A. Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” and the subsequent Chernobyl disaster with the Death Zone deployed around these places. The “inner hearing” of Makanin’s gift led the writer to the phenomenon of a dystopian text: The issue of the magazine “New World” with V. Makanin’s dystopian story “One-Day War” was signed for publication exactly two weeks before September 11, 2001, when the terrorist attack hit America was the beginning of the “uninvited war.” The plot of the story, for all its fantastic nature, seems copied from real events. The text appears to chronicle the events that followed in New York on September 11, 2001. Thus, the writer writing a dystopia moves along the path of gradually drawing the real outlines of the very abyss into which humanity, man, is directed. Among such writers, prominent figures include V. Pietsukh, A. Kabakov, L. Petrushevskaya, V. Makanin, V. Rybakov, T. Tolstoy and others.

In the 1920s, E. Zamyatin, one of the founders of Russian dystopia, promised that literature in the 20th century would come to a combination of the fantastic with everyday life and would become that devilish mixture, the secret of which Hieronymus Bosch knew so well. The literature of the end of the century exceeded all the Master's expectations.

Classification of modern Russian literature.

Modern Russian literature is classified into:

· Neoclassical prose

· Conditional-metaphorical prose

· "Other prose"

· Postmodernism

Neoclassical prose addresses the social and ethical problems of life, based on the realistic tradition, and inherits the “teaching” and “preaching” orientation of Russian classical literature. The life of society in neoclassical prose is main theme, and the meaning of life is the main issue. The author's worldview is expressed through the hero, the hero himself inherits an active life position, he takes on the role of a judge. The peculiarity of neoclassical prose is that the author and the hero are in a state of dialogue. It is characterized by a naked view of the terrible, monstrous in its cruelty and immorality phenomena of our life, but the principles of love, kindness, brotherhood - and - most importantly - conciliarity - determine the existence of a Russian person in it. Representatives of neoclassical prose include: V. Astafiev " Sad detective", "The Damned and the Killed", "The Cheerful Soldier", V. Rasputin "To the Same Land", "Fire", B. Vasiliev "Quench My Sorrows", A. Pristavkin "A Golden Cloud Spent the Night", D. Bykov "Spelling ", M. Vishnevetskaya "The Moon Came Out of the Fog", L. Ulitskaya "The Case of Kukotsky", "Medea and Her Children", A. Volos "Real Estate", M. Paley "Cabiria from the Obvodny Canal".

In conventionally metaphorical prose, a myth, a fairy tale, a scientific concept form a bizarre but recognizable modern world. Spiritual inferiority and dehumanization acquire material embodiment in metaphor, people turn into various animals, predators, werewolves. Conventional-metaphorical prose sees the absurd in real life, guesses catastrophic paradoxes in everyday life, uses fantastic assumptions, and tests the hero with extraordinary possibilities. She is not characterized by psychological volume of character. A characteristic genre of conditionally metaphorical prose is dystopia. The following authors and their works belong to conditionally metaphorical prose: F. Iskander “Rabbits and Boas”, V. Pelevin “The Life of Insects”, “Omon Ra”, D. Bykov “Justification”, T. Tolstaya “Kys”, V. Makanin “Laz”, V. Rybakov “Gravilet”, “Tsesarevich”, L. Petrushevskaya “New Robinsons”, A. Kabakov “Defector”, S. Lukyanenko “Spectrum”.

“Other prose,” unlike conventionally metaphorical prose, does not create a fantastic world, but reveals the fantastic in the surrounding, real. It usually depicts a destroyed world, everyday life, a fractured history, a torn culture, a world of socially “shifted” characters and circumstances. It is characterized by the features of opposition to officialdom, a rejection of established stereotypes, and moralizing. The ideal in it is either implied or looms, and the author’s position is disguised. Randomness reigns in the plots. “Other prose” is not characterized by a traditional author-reader dialogue. Representatives of this prose are: V. Erofeev, V. Pietsukh, T. Tolstaya, L. Petrushevskaya, L. Gabyshev.

Postmodernism is one of the most influential cultural phenomena of the second half of the 20th century. In postmodernism, the image of the world is built on the basis of intracultural connections. The will and laws of culture are higher than the will and laws of “reality”. At the end of the 1980s, it became possible to talk about postmodernism as an integral part of literature, but by the beginning of the 21st century we have to state the end of the “postmodern era.” The most characteristic definitions that accompany the concept of “reality” in the aesthetics of postmodernism are chaotic, changeable, fluid, incomplete, fragmentary; the world is the “scattered links” of existence, forming into bizarre and sometimes absurd patterns of human lives or into a temporarily frozen picture in the kaleidoscope of universal history. Unshakable universal values ​​are losing their axiom status in the postmodern picture of the world. Everything is relative. N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky write about this very accurately in their article “Life after death, or New information about realism”: “The unbearable lightness of being”, the weightlessness of all hitherto unshakable absolutes (not only universal, but also personal) - that’s it the tragic state of mind that postmodernism expressed."

Russian postmodernism had a number of features. First of all, it is a game, demonstrativeness, shockingness, playing on quotes from classical and socialist realist literature. Russian postmodernist creativity is non-evaluative creativity, containing categoricalness in the subconscious, beyond the boundaries of the text. Russian postmodern writers include: V. Kuritsyn “Dry thunderstorms: the flickering zone”, V. Sorokin “Blue lard”, V. Pelevin “Chapaev and Emptiness”, V. Makanin “Underground, or Hero of our time”, M. Butov "Freedom", A. Bitov "Pushkin House", V. Erofeev "Moscow - Cockerels", Y. Buida "Prussian Bride".

A people deprived of public freedom has the only platform from the height of which they make the cry of their indignation and their conscience heard,” wrote A.I. Herzen in the last century. For the first time in the entire centuries-old history of Russia, the government has now given us freedom of speech and press. But despite the enormous role of the media, domestic literature is the ruler of thoughts, raising layer after layer of the problem of our history and life. Maybe E. Yevtushenko was right when he said: “in Russia - more than a poet!..”.

Today one can very clearly trace the artistic, historical, socio-political significance literary work in connection with the socio-political situation of the era. This formulation means that the characteristics of the era are reflected in the topic chosen by the author, his heroes, artistic means. These features can give a work great social and political significance. Thus, in the era of the decline of serfdom and the nobility, a whole line works about " extra people", including the famous "Hero of Our Time" by M.Yu. Lermontov. The very name of the novel and the controversy surrounding it showed its social significance in the era of the Nikolaev reaction. A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” published during the period of criticism of Stalinism in the early 60s, was also of great importance. Contemporary works demonstrate an even greater connection than before between the era and the literary work. Now the task is to revive the rural owner. Literature responds to it with books about the dispossession and de-peasantization of the village.

The closest connection between modernity and history even gives rise to new genres (for example, chronicle) and new visual arts: documents are entered into the text, time travel over many decades is popular, and more. The same applies to problems of environmental protection. It can't be tolerated anymore. The desire to help society forces writers, for example Valentin Rasputin, to move from novels and stories to journalism.

The first theme, which unites a very large number of works written during the 50s - 80s, is the problem historical memory. The epigraph to it could be the words of Academician D.S. Likhachev: “Memory is active. It does not leave a person indifferent or inactive. She controls the mind and heart of a person. Memory resists the destructive power of time. This is the greatest meaning of memory."

“Blank spots” were formed (or rather, they were formed by those who constantly adapted history to their interests) not only in the history of the entire country, but also in its individual regions. Viktor Likhonosov’s book “Our Little Paris” about Kuban. He believes its historians owe a debt to their land. “Children grew up without knowledge of their native history.” About two years ago the writer was in America, where he met with residents of the Russian colony, emigrants and their descendants from Kuban Cossacks. A storm of reader letters and responses was caused by the publication of the novel, the chronicle of Anatoly Znamensky “Red Days,” which reported new facts from the civil history of the Don. The writer himself did not immediately come to the truth and only in the sixties realized that “we know nothing at all about that era.” IN last years Several new works have been published, such as Sergei Alekseev’s novel “Sedition,” but there is still a lot unknown.

The theme of those innocently repressed and tortured during the years of Stalin's terror is especially prominent. Alexander Solzhenitsyn did a tremendous amount of work in his “GULAG Archipelago.” In the afterword to the book, he says: “I stopped working not because I considered the book finished, but because there was no more life left for it. I not only ask for leniency, but I want to shout: when the time comes, the opportunity comes, gather together, friends, survivors, those who know well, and write another comment next to this one...” Thirty-four years have passed since those were written, no, embossed on heart, these words. Solzhenitsyn himself has already edited the book abroad, dozens of new evidence have come out, and this call will remain, apparently, for many decades, both to the contemporaries of those tragedies, and to descendants, before whom the archives of the executioners will finally open. After all, even the number of victims is unknown!.. The victory of democracy in August 1991 gives hope that the archives will soon be opened.

And therefore, the words of the already mentioned writer Znamensky seem to me not entirely correct: “And how much should have been said about the past, it seems to me, has already been said by A.I. Solzhenitsyn and in “ Kolyma stories"Varlam Shalamov, and in the story "Bas-relief on the Rock" by Aldan - Semenov. And I myself, 25 years ago, during the years of the so-called Thaw, paid tribute to this topic; my story about the camps called “Without Repentance”... was published in the magazine “North” (N10, 1988).” No, I think witnesses, writers, and historians still have to work hard.

Much has already been written about Stalin’s victims and executioners. I note that a continuation of the novel “Children of the Arbat” by A. Rybakov, “The Thirty-Fifth and Other Years,” has been published, in which many pages are devoted to the secret springs of the preparation and conduct of the trials of the 30s against the former leaders of the Bolshevik Party.

Thinking about Stalin’s time, your thoughts involuntarily turn to the revolution. And today it is seen in many ways differently. “We are told that the Russian revolution did not bring anything, that we have great poverty. Absolutely right. But... We have a perspective, we see a way out, we have will, desire, we see a path before us...” - this is what N. Bukharin wrote. Now we are wondering: what did this will do to the country, where did this path lead and where is the way out. In search of an answer, we begin to turn to the origins, to October.

It seems to me that A. Solzhenitsyn explores this more deeply than anyone else. Moreover, these issues are addressed in many of his books. But the main thing of this writer about the origins and beginning of our revolution is the multi-volume “Red Wheel”. We have already printed parts of it - “August the fourteenth”, “October the sixteenth”. The four-volume “March the Seventeenth” is also being published. Alexander Isaevich continues to work hard on the epic.

Solzhenitsyn persistently does not recognize not only the October, but also the February revolution, considering the overthrow of the monarchy a tragedy of the Russian people. He argues that the morality of the revolution and revolutionaries is inhumane and inhumane; the leaders of revolutionary parties, including Lenin, are unprincipled and think, first of all, about personal power. It is impossible to agree with him, but it is also impossible not to listen, especially since the writer uses a huge number of facts and historical evidence. I would like to note that this outstanding writer has already agreed to return to his homeland.

There are similar discussions about the revolution in the memoirs of the writer Oleg Volkov, “Plunge into Darkness.” , intellectual and patriot in the best sense words, spent 28 years in prisons and exile. He writes: “In the more than two years that my father lived after the revolution, it was already clearly and irrevocably determined: the harshly tamed peasant and the somewhat softer bridled worker had to identify themselves with the authorities. But it was no longer possible to talk about this, to expose imposture and deception, to explain that the iron lattice of the new order leads to enslavement and the formation of an oligarchy. And it’s useless..."

Is this the way to evaluate the revolution?! It's hard to say; only time will make a final verdict. Personally, I do not consider this point of view correct, but it is also difficult to refute it: you will not forget either about Stalinism or about the deep crisis of today. It is also clear that it is no longer possible to study the revolution and the civil revolution from the films “Lenin in October”, “Chapaev” or from V. Mayakovsky’s poems “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” and “Good”. The more we learn about this era, the more independently we will come to some conclusions. A lot of interesting things about this time can be gleaned from Shatrov’s plays, B. Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”, V. Grossman’s story “Everything Flows” and others.

If there are sharp differences in the assessment of the revolution, then everyone condemns Stalin’s collectivization. And how can it be justified if it led to the ruin of the country, the death of millions of hardworking owners, and a terrible famine! And again I would like to quote Oleg Volkov about the time close to the “great turning point”:

“Then they were just organizing the mass transportation of robbed men into the abyss of the desert expanses of the North. For the time being, they snatched it selectively: they would impose an “individual” unpaid tax, wait a little, and then declare him a saboteur. And then there’s lafa: confiscate the property and throw it in prison!...”

Vasily Belov tells us about the village before the collective farm in the novel “Eves”. The continuation is “The Year of the Great Turnaround, Chronicle of 9 Months,” which describes the beginning of collectivization. One of the true works about the tragedy of the peasantry during the period of collectivization is the novel - the chronicle of Boris Mozhaev “Men and Women”. The writer, relying on documents, shows how that stratum in the village is formed and takes power, which prospers from the ruin and misfortune of fellow villagers and is ready to be fierce in order to please the authorities. The author shows that the culprits of the “excesses” and “dizziness from success” are those who ruled the country.

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“Review of Russian and modern literature”

The chronological framework of the modern literary process in Russia is the last fifteen years of the outgoing century, including heterogeneous phenomena and facts of modern literature, heated theoretical discussions, critical discord, literary awards of varying significance, the activities of thick magazines and new publishing houses that are actively publishing works of modern writers.

Modern literature is closely connected, despite its fundamental and undoubted novelty, with the literary life and sociocultural situation of the decades preceding it, the so-called period of “modern literature.” This is a fairly large stage in the existence and development of our literature - from the mid-50s to the mid-80s.

The mid-50s is a new starting point for our literature. The famous report by N.S. Khrushchev at a “closed” meeting of the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, marked the beginning of the liberation of the consciousness of millions of people from the hypnosis of Stalin’s personality cult. The era was called the “Khrushchev Thaw,” which gave birth to the generation of the “sixties,” its contradictory ideology and dramatic fate. Unfortunately, to a genuine rethink Soviet history, political terror, the role of the generation of the 20s in it, the essence of Stalinism, neither the authorities nor the “sixties” approached. The failures of the “Khrushchev Thaw” as an era of change are largely due to this. But in literature there were processes of renewal, reassessment of values ​​and creative searches.

Even before the well-known decisions of the party congress of 1956, a breakthrough to new content took place in Soviet literature through the barriers of the “conflict-free theory” of the 40s, through the rigid guidelines of the theory and practice of socialist realism, through the inertia of reader perception. And not only in the literature that was written “on the table”. V. Ovechkin’s modest essays “District Everyday Life” showed the reader the true situation of the post-war village, its social and moral problems. “Lyrical prose” by V. Soloukhin and E. Dorosh took the reader away from the main paths of the builders of socialism into the real world of Russian “country roads”, in which there is no external heroism, pathos, but there is poetry, folk wisdom, great work, love for the native land.

These works, by the very life material underlying them, destroyed the mythologies of socialist realism literature about the ideal Soviet life, about a heroic man going “ever forward and higher” under the inspiring, inspiring and guiding leadership of the party.

The coming “Khrushchev thaw” seemed to open the floodgates. For a long time held back, a qualitatively different literature poured out. Books of poems by wonderful poets came to the reader: L. Martynov (“Birthright”), N. Aseev (“Lad”), V. Lugovsky (“Mid-Century”). And by the mid-60s, even poetry books by M. Tsvetaeva, B. Pasternak, A. Akhmatova would be published.

In 1956, an unprecedented celebration of poetry took place and the almanac “Poetry Day” was published. Both poetic holidays - meetings of poets with their readers, and the Poetry Day almanacs will become annual. “Young prose” boldly and brightly declared itself (V. Aksenov, A. Bitov, A. Gladilin. The poets E. Yevtushenko, A. Voznesensky, R. Rozhdestvensky, B. Akhmadulina and others became the idols of youth. “Variety poetry” collected audiences of thousands for poetry evenings at the Luzhniki Stadium.

B. Okudzhava’s original song introduced into the dialogue between the poet and the listener an intonation of trust and participation that was unusual for a Soviet person. Human, and not ideologically stilted problems and conflicts in the plays of A. Arbuzov, V. Rozov, A. Volodin transformed Soviet theater and his viewer. The policy of “thick” magazines changed, and in the early sixties, “New World” by A. Tvardovsky published stories “ Matrenin Dvor“,” “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “The Incident at Krechetovka Station” by A.I., who returned from the camps and exile and was still unknown to anyone. Solzhenitsyn.

Undoubtedly, these phenomena changed the nature of the literary process and significantly broke with the tradition of socialist realism, essentially the only officially recognized method of Soviet literature since the early 30s.

Reader tastes, interests, and preferences were also transformed under the influence of the rather active publication of works of world literature of the 20th century in the 60s, primarily by French writers - existentialists Sartre, Camus, the innovative dramaturgy of Beckett, Ionesco, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, the tragic prose of Kafka, etc. The Iron Curtain gradually moved apart.

But changes in Soviet culture, as in life, were not so clearly encouraging. Real literary life Almost the same years were marked by the cruel persecution of B.L. Pasternak for the publication in the West of his novel Doctor Zhivago in 1958. The struggle between the magazines “October” and “New World” (Vs. Kochetov and A. Tvardovsky) was merciless. “Secretary literature” did not give up its positions, but healthy literary forces nevertheless did their creative work. Genuinely artistic, rather than opportunistically constructed, texts began to penetrate into the so-called official literature.

In the late fifties, young front-line prose writers turned to the recent past: they explored the dramatic and tragic situations of the war through the point of view of a simple soldier, a young officer. Often these situations were cruel, forcing a person to choose between heroism and betrayal, life and death. Critics of that time greeted the first works of V. Bykov, Yu. Bondarev, G. Baklanov, V. Astafiev with caution and disapproval, accusing the “literature of lieutenants” of “deheroizing” the Soviet soldier, of “trench truth” and the inability or unwillingness to show the panorama of events. In this prose, the value center shifted from the event to the person, moral and philosophical problematics replaced the heroic-romantic ones, and new hero, who bore the harsh everyday life of war on his shoulders. “The strength and freshness of the new books was that, without rejecting the best traditions of military prose, they showed in all the magnifying detail the soldier’s “facial expression” and the “patch to death”, bridgeheads, nameless high-rises, containing a generalization of the entire trench severity of the war . Often these books carried a charge of cruel drama; they could often be defined as “optimistic tragedies”; their main characters were soldiers and officers of one platoon, company, battery, regiment.” These new realities of literature were also signs, typological features of the changing nature of the literary process, beginning to overcome the socialist realist one-dimensionality of literature.

Attention to a person, his essence, and not his social role, became the defining property of the literature of the 60s. The so-called “village prose” has become a true phenomenon of our culture. She raised a range of issues that still arouse keen interest and controversy to this day. As you can see, truly vital issues were touched upon.

The term "hillbilly prose" was coined by critics. A.I. Solzhenitsyn in his “Word at the presentation of the Solzhenitsyn Prize to Valentin Rasputin” clarified: “It would be more correct to call them moralists - for the essence of their literary revolution was the revival of traditional morality, and the crushed, dying village was only a natural, visual object.” The term is conditional, because the basis for the association of “village writers” is not at all a thematic principle. Not every work about the village was classified as “village prose.”

Village writers changed their point of view: they showed the inner drama of the existence of a modern village, and discovered in an ordinary villager a personality capable of moral creation. Sharing the main focus " village prose”, in a commentary to the novel “And the day lasts longer than a century,” Ch. Aitmatov formulated the task of the literature of his time as follows: “The duty of literature is to think globally, without losing sight of its central interest, which I understand as the study of a separate human individuality. With this attention to the individual, “village prose” revealed a typological relationship with Russian classical literature. Writers return to the traditions of classical Russian realism, almost abandoning the experience of their closest predecessors - socialist realist writers - and not accepting the aesthetics of modernism. “The Villagers” address the most difficult and pressing problems of human existence and society and believe that the harsh life material of their prose a priori excludes the playful element in its interpretation. The teacher's moral pathos of Russian classics is organically close to “village prose.” The problematics of the prose of Belov and Shukshin, Zalygin and Astafiev, Rasputin, Abramov, Mozhaev and E. Nosov were never abstractly significant, but only concretely human. The life, pain and torment of an ordinary person, most often a peasant (the salt of the Russian soil), who falls under the skating rink of the history of the state or fatal circumstances, has become the material of “village prose”. His dignity, courage, ability in these conditions to remain faithful to himself, to the foundations of the peasant world turned out to be the main discovery and moral lesson"village prose". A. Adamovich wrote in this regard: “Saved, carried through centuries and trials alive soul people - isn’t this what they breathe, isn’t this what the prose, which today is called rural, tells us about first of all? And if they write and say that prose, both military and rural, are the pinnacle achievements of our modern literature, is it not because here the writers touched the very nerve of people’s life.

The stories and novels of these writers are dramatic - one of the central images in them is the image of their native land - the Arkhangelsk village by F. Abramov, the Vologda village by V. Belov, the Siberian village by V. Rasputin and V. Astafiev, the Altai village by V. Shukshin. It is impossible not to love it and the person on it - the roots, the basis of everything, are in it. The reader feels the writer's love for the people, but there is no idealization of them in these works. F. Abramov wrote: “I stand for the people’s principle in literature, but I am a resolute opponent of a prayerful attitude to everything that my contemporary says... To love the people means to see with complete clarity both their merits and shortcomings, and their greatness and small, and ups and downs. Writing for the people means helping them understand their strengths and weaknesses.”

The novelty of social and moral content does not exhaust the merits of “village prose.” Ontological issues, deep psychologism, and the beautiful language of this prose have been identified qualitatively new stage literary process of Soviet literature - its modern period, with all the complex complex of searches at the content and artistic levels.

The lyrical prose of Y. Kazakov, the first stories of A. Bitov, and the “quiet lyrics” of V. Sokolov and N. Rubtsov added new facets to the literary process of the 60s.

However, the compromise of the “thaw” and the half-truths of this era led to the tightening of censorship in the late 60s. The party leadership of literature with renewed vigor began to regulate and determine the content and paradigm of artistry. Everything that did not coincide with the general line was squeezed out of the process. The Movist prose of V. Kataev received blows from official criticism. “New World” was taken away from Tvardovsky. The persecution of A. Solzhenitsyn and the persecution of I. Brodsky began. The sociocultural situation was changing - “stagnation was setting in.”

In Russian literary culture at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries, many interesting, but insufficiently meaningful pages have still been preserved, the study of which could contribute to a deeper understanding of not only the laws of the evolution of verbal art, but also of certain major socio-political and historical and cultural events of Russian of the past. Therefore, it now seems quite important to turn to journals that for a long time, often due to ideological conjuncture, remained outside of close research attention.

Russian literature late XIX- the beginning of the 20th century is a special, dynamic period characterized, among other things, by the formation of new ideals, an acute struggle between social groups and parties, the coexistence and clash of various literary trends, movements and schools, one way or another reflecting the complex historical and socio-political realities and phenomena of the era, through intensive contacts with foreign art. For example, the philosophical and ideological foundations of Russian symbolism are largely connected with the German cultural and artistic tradition and philosophy (I. Kant, A. Schopenhauer, Fr. Nietzsche). At the same time, France became the true birthplace of symbolism. It was here that the main stylistic features of this large-scale artistic phenomenon took shape, and its first manifestos and program declarations were published. From here symbolism began its triumphal march through the countries Western Europe and Russia. Literature not only represented historical events in the works of domestic and foreign authors of different ideological beliefs, but also revealed the reasons that prompted them to create; The reactions of readers and critics to published works, including translated ones, were incorporated into the literary and social consciousness, demonstrating the degree of their impact on the audience.

Along with books, literary collections, critical publications, printed periodicals were very popular both among literary figures and among readers: newspapers (“Moskovskie Vedomosti”, “Citizen”, “Svet”, “Novoye Vremya”, “Birzhevye Vedomosti” ", "Russian Gazette", "Courier", etc.), magazines ("Bulletin of Europe" by M.M. Stasyulevich - 1866-1918; "Russian Gazette" by M.N. Katkov - 1856-1906; "Dragonfly" by I. F. Vasilevsky - 1875-1908; “Russian Wealth” - 1876-1918; “Russian Thought” - 1880-1918, etc.) and the original form of the mono-journal - diaries, created by F.M. Dostoevsky (“Diary of a Writer” by D.V. Averkiev - 1885-1886; A.B. Kruglova - 1907-1914; F.K. Sologub -1914). We emphasize that all literary magazines at that time were private, and only the “Journal of the Ministry of Public Education” (1834-1917), devoted largely to literary issues, was state-owned. Let us note that the appearance of magazines, starting from the 1840s, was largely determined by the social and political views of the publishers.

The socio-political and economic changes in our country, which began in 1985 and called perestroika, significantly influenced literary development. “Democratization”, “glasnost”, “pluralism”, proclaimed from above as new norms of social and cultural life, led to a reassessment of values ​​in our literature.

Thick magazines began actively publishing works by Soviet writers written in the seventies and earlier, but for ideological reasons not published then. Thus, the novels “Children of Arbat” by A. Rybakov, “New Assignment” by A. Beck, “White Clothes” by V. Dudintsev, “Life and Fate” by V. Grossman and others were published. The camp theme, the theme of Stalinist repressions becomes almost the main one . The stories of V. Shalamov and the prose of Yu. Dombrovsky are widely published in periodicals. “New World” was published by A. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

In 1988, again, “New World”, thirty years after its creation, published B. Pasternak’s disgraced novel “Doctor Zhivago” with a foreword by D.S. Likhacheva. All these works were classified as so-called “detained literature.” The attention of critics and readers was focused exclusively on them. Magazine circulation reached unprecedented levels, approaching the million mark. “New World”, “Znamya”, “October” competed in publishing activity.

Another stream of the literary process in the second half of the eighties consisted of the works of Russian writers of the 20s and 30s. For the first time in Russia, it was at this time that “big things” by A. Platonov were published - the novel “Chevengur”, the stories “The Pit”, “The Juvenile Sea”, and other works of the writer. Oberiuts are published, E.I. Zamyatin and other writers of the 20th century. At the same time, our magazines reprinted works of the 60s and 70s that were cherished in samizdat and published in the West, such as “Pushkin House” by A. Bitov, “Moscow - Petushki” by Ven. Erofeeva, “Burn” by V. Aksenov and others.

The literature of the Russian abroad was equally powerfully represented in the modern literary process: the works of V. Nabokov, I. Shmelev, B. Zaitsev, A. Remizov, M. Aldanov, A. Averchenko, Vl. Khodasevich and many other Russian writers returned to their homeland. “Returned literature” and the literature of the Metropolis are finally merging into one channel of Russian literature of the 20th century. Naturally, both the reader, criticism, and literary criticism find themselves in a very difficult situation, because the new, complete, without blank spots, map of Russian literature dictates a new hierarchy of values, makes it necessary to develop new evaluation criteria, proposes the creation new history Russian literature of the 20th century without cuts or exceptions. Under the powerful onslaught of first-class works of the past, widely available to the domestic reader for the first time, modern literature seems to freeze, trying to understand itself in new conditions. The nature of the modern literary process is determined by “detained” and “returned” literature. Without representing the modern cross-section of literature, it is precisely this literature that influences the reader to the greatest extent, determining his tastes and preferences. It is she who finds herself at the center of critical discussions. Criticism, also freed from the shackles of ideology, demonstrates a wide range of judgments and assessments.

For the first time we are witnessing such a phenomenon when the concepts of “modern literary process” and “modern literature” do not coincide. In the five years from 1986 to 1990, the modern literary process consists of works of the past, ancient and not so distant. Actually, modern literature is pushed to the periphery of the process.

One cannot but agree with the generalizing judgment of A. Nemzer: “The literary policy of perestroika had a pronounced compensatory character. It was necessary to make up for lost time - to catch up, to return, to eliminate gaps, to integrate into the global context.” We really sought to compensate for lost time, to pay off old debts. As we see this time from today, the publishing boom of the perestroika years, despite the undoubted significance of newly discovered works, involuntarily distracted public consciousness from the dramatic modernity.

The actual liberation of culture from state ideological control and pressure in the second half of the 80s was legislatively formalized on August 1, 1990 by the abolition of censorship. Naturally, the history of “samizdat” and “tamizdat” came to an end. With the collapse Soviet Union serious changes took place in the Union of Soviet Writers. It split into several writers' organizations, the struggle between which sometimes becomes serious. But various writing organizations and their “ideological and aesthetic platforms,” perhaps for the first time in Soviet and post-Soviet history, have virtually no influence on the living literary process. It develops under the influence not of directives, but of other factors that are more organic to literature as an art form. In particular, the discovery, one might say, of culture anew silver age and its new understanding in literary criticism has been one of the significant factors determining the literary process since the beginning of the 90s.

The work of N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, M. Voloshin, Vyach was rediscovered in full. Ivanova, Vl. Khodasevich and many other major representatives of the culture of Russian modernism. The publishers of the large series “The New Library of the Poet” made their contribution to this fruitful process, releasing beautifully prepared collections of the poetic work of writers of the “Silver Age”. The Ellis Lack publishing house not only publishes multi-volume collections of works by classics of the Silver Age (Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova), but also publishes writers of the second rank, for example, G. Chulkov’s excellent volume “Years of Wanderings,” which represents different creative facets of the writer, and some of his works are generally published first. The same can be said about the activities of the Agraf publishing house, which published a collection of works by L. Zinovieva-Annibal. Today we can talk about M. Kuzmin almost entirely published by various publishing houses. The publishing house "Respublika" has carried out a remarkable literary project- multi-volume edition by A. Bely. These examples can be continued.

Fundamental monographic studies by N. Bogomolov, L. Kolobaeva and other scientists help to imagine the mosaic and complexity of the literature of the Silver Age. Due to ideological prohibitions, we could not master this culture “over time,” which would undoubtedly be fruitful. It literally “fell” on the general reader out of the blue, often provoking an apologetic, enthusiastic reaction. Meanwhile, this most complex phenomenon deserves close and attentive gradual reading and study. But it happened the way it happened. Modern culture and the reader found themselves under the most powerful pressure of a culture that was rejected during the Soviet period as not only ideologically, but also aesthetically alien. Now the experience of modernism of the beginning of the century and avant-gardeism of the 20s has to be absorbed and rethought in the shortest possible time. We can state not only the fact of the existence of works of the early 20th century as full participants in the modern literary process, but also affirm the fact of overlaps, influences of different movements and schools, their simultaneous presence as a qualitative characteristic of the literary process of modern times.

If we take into account the colossal boom in memoir literature, we are faced with another feature of this process. The influence of memoirs on fiction itself is obvious to many researchers. Thus, one of the participants in the discussion “Memoirs at the Turn of Eras,” I. Shaitanov, rightly emphasizes the high artistic quality of memoir literature: “When approaching the sphere fiction memoir genre begins to lose its documentary quality, giving a lesson in the responsibility of literature in relation to the word...” Despite the researcher’s accurate observation about a certain departure from documentation in many of the published memoirs, memoirs for readers are a means of recreating the social and spiritual history of society, a means of overcoming the “blank spots” of culture, and simply good literature.

Perestroika gave impetus to the intensification of publishing activity. In the early 90s, new publishing houses and new literary magazines of various directions appeared - from the progressive literary journal New Literary Review to the feminist magazine Preobrazhenie. Bookstores-salons “Summer Garden”, “Eidos”, “October 19” and others were born of a new state of culture and, in turn, have a certain influence on the literary process, reflecting and popularizing in their activities one or another trend of modern literature.

In the 90s, for the first time since the revolution, the works of many Russian religious philosophers of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, Slavophiles and Westerners were republished: from V. Solovyov to P. Florensky, A. Khomyakov and P. Chaadaev. The Respublika publishing house is completing the publication of the multi-volume collected works of Vasily Rozanov. These realities of book publishing undoubtedly significantly influence modern literary development, enriching the literary process. By the mid-90s, the literary heritage previously unclaimed by the Soviet country had almost completely returned to the national cultural space. And modern literature itself has noticeably strengthened its position. Thick magazines again provided their pages to contemporary writers. The modern literary process in Russia, as it should be, is again determined exclusively by modern literature. According to stylistic, genre, and linguistic parameters, it is not reducible to a certain cause-and-effect pattern, which, however, does not at all exclude the presence of patterns and connections within the literary process of a more complex order. It is difficult to agree with researchers who do not see any signs of a process in modern literature. Moreover, this position often turns out to be unusually contradictory. For example, G.L. Nefagina states: “The state of literature of the 90s can be compared with the Brownian movement,” and then continues: “a single general cultural system is being formed.” As we can see, the researcher does not deny the existence of the system. Since there is a system, there are also patterns. What kind of “Brownian motion” is this! This point of view is a tribute to a fashionable trend, the idea of ​​modern literature after the collapse of the ideological hierarchy of values ​​as postmodern chaos. The life of literature, especially literature with such traditions as Russian, despite the times it has experienced, it seems, not only continues fruitfully, but also lends itself to analytical systematization.

Criticism has already done a lot by analyzing the main trends of modern literature. The magazines “Questions of Literature”, “Znamya”, “New World” conduct “ round tables", discussions of leading critics on the state of modern literature. In recent years, several respectable monographs on postmodernism in Russian literature have been published.

Problems of modern literary development, as we see it, lies in the mainstream of the development and refraction of various traditions of world culture in the conditions of the crisis state of the world (ecological and man-made disasters, natural disasters, terrible epidemics, rampant terrorism, the flourishing of mass culture, a crisis of morality, the onset of virtual reality, etc.), which all of humanity experiences with us. Psychologically, it is aggravated by the general situation at the turn of centuries and even millennia. And in the situation of our country - awareness and elimination of all the contradictions and collisions of the Soviet period of national history and culture of socialist realism.

Atheistic education of generations Soviet people, a situation of spiritual substitution, when for millions of people religion and faith were replaced by the mythologies of socialism, has dire consequences for modern man. To what extent does literature respond to these most difficult life and spiritual realities? Should it, as it was in classical Russian literature, give answers to the difficult questions of existence, or at least pose them to the reader, contribute to the “softening of morals”, cordiality in people’s relationships? Or is the writer an impartial and cold observer of human vices and weaknesses? Or maybe the destiny of literature is to escape into a world of fantasy and adventure far from reality?.. And the field of literature is an aesthetic or intellectual game, and literature has nothing to do with real life, with man in general? Does a person need art? A Word alienated from God, separated from divine truth? These questions are very real and require answers.

In our criticism there are different points of view on the modern literary process and the very purpose of literature. Thus, A. Nemzer is confident that literature has stood the test of freedom and the last decade has been “wonderful.” The critic identified thirty names of Russian prose writers with whom he associates the fruitful future of our literature. Tatyana Kasatkina in her article “Literature after the End of Times” argues that there is no single literature now, but there are “shreds and fragments.” She proposes to divide the “texts” of current literature into three groups: “Works, the reading of which is an event in a person’s real life, which does not take him away from this life, but participates in it... works from which one does not want to return to real life, and this their fundamental, constitutional (and not at all positive) property... works that you don’t want to return to, even if you realize their value, that are hard to enter a second time, that have all the properties of a zone with the effect of accumulating radiation.” Without sharing the researcher’s general pathos in assessing current state domestic literature, you can use its classification. After all, such a division is based on time-tested principles - the nature of the reflection of reality in literature and the author’s position.

The last fifteen years of the 20th century are especially significant in the history of our literature. Russian literature finally turned out to be free from directive ideological pressure. At the same time, the literary process was characterized by increased drama and complexity of an objective nature.

The desire to recreate the history of literature of the last century in its entirety (returning to the reader the works of A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov, B. Pasternak, Oberiuts, writers of the Silver Age, emigrants, etc., which were forcibly not allowed in Soviet times) almost supplanted modern literature in general. Thick magazines experienced a publishing boom. Their circulation was approaching the million mark. It seemed that contemporary writers were relegated to the periphery of the process and were of little interest to anyone. The active reassessment of the culture of the Soviet period in the “new criticism” (“Wake for Soviet Literature”), as categorical as its recent apologetics in official criticism, caused a feeling of confusion among both readers and writers themselves. And when the circulation of thick magazines fell sharply in the early 90s (political and economic reforms entered an active phase in the country), modern literature generally lost its main platform. Intracultural problems became even more complicated under the influence of extraliterary factors.

In criticism, discussions arose around the problem of the modern literary process, and voices were heard questioning the very fact of its existence. Some researchers argued that the collapse of a unified and mandatory system of ideological and aesthetic attitudes, and the resulting multidirectionality of literary development, lead to the automatic disappearance of the literary process. And yet the literary process survived, Russian literature stood the test of freedom. Moreover, in recent years there has been an obvious strengthening of the position of modern literature in the literary process. This is especially true for prose. Almost every new issue of such magazines as “New World”, “Znamya”, “October”, “Zvezda” gives us something new. interesting work, which is read, discussed and discussed.

The literary process of the 20th century is a unique phenomenon that embodies a complex interaction of multidirectional vectors of aesthetic search. The archetypal collision “archaists and innovators” has found its forms of embodiment in the literature of modern times. But at the same time, both writers who gravitate towards classical traditions and experimental pioneers - all, within the parameters of the artistic paradigm they have adopted, are looking for forms that are adequate to changes in the consciousness of modern man, new ideas about the world, about the function of language, about the place and role of literature.

The study of the modern literary process is multifaceted and involves the analysis and systematization of a huge factual material. The framework of the benefit can hardly accommodate it.

The manual focuses on the most characteristic phenomena of modern literature, primarily related to various principles of artistic reflection of life reality. In modern Russian literature, as in the world artistic process, there is a confrontation between realism and postmodernism. The philosophical and aesthetic principles of postmodernism are actively being introduced by its brilliant theorists into the world artistic process, postmodernist ideas and images are in the air. Even in the works of realistically oriented writers, such as Makanin, for example, we see a fairly widespread use of elements of postmodernist poetics. However, in recent years, crisis phenomena have been obvious in the artistic practice of postmodernists themselves. The ideological load in postmodernism is so great that “artistry” itself, as the immanent nature of literature, begins to simply collapse under such influence.

Some researchers of postmodernism are prone to pessimistic forecasts and believe that its history in Russia was “stunningly stormy, but short” (M. Epstein), i.e. reflect on it as a past phenomenon. Of course, there is some simplification in this statement, but the replication of techniques, self-repetition in the latest works of famous postmodernists V. Sorokin, V. Erofeev and others indicate the exhaustion of “style”. And the reader, apparently, begins to get tired of the “courage” in removing linguistic and moral taboos, of the intellectual game, blurring of the boundaries of the text and the programmed multiplicity of its interpretations.

The reader of today, as one of the subjects of the literary process, plays an important role in it. It was his need to know the true realities of history, the disbelief in the “artistically” transformed past in the works of Soviet literature, which lied so much about life and “straightened” it, that provoked a colossal interest in memoirs, its real flourishing in recent literature.

The reader returns literature to the traditional values ​​of realism, expects “cordiality”, responsiveness, and good style from it. It is precisely from this readership that the fame and popularity of Boris Akunin, for example, grows. The writer correctly calculated system stability and plot thoroughness detective genre(everyone is so tired of the lack of plot and chaos of the artistic world of postmodern works). He diversified genre shades as much as possible (from spy to political detective), invented a mysterious and charming hero - detective Fandorin - and immersed us in the atmosphere of the 19th century, so attractive from a historical distance. And the high-level stylized language of his prose completed the job. Akunin became a cult writer with his own wide circle of admirers.

It is interesting that at the other pole of literature there is also its own cult figure - Viktor Pelevin, a guru for an entire generation. Virtual world His works are gradually replaced by the real world for his admirers; truly, they acquire “the world as a text.” Pelevin, as we noted above, talented artist, revealing tragic collisions in the fate of humanity. However, the reader's perception of his work reveals the vulnerability and even inferiority of the artistic world he creates. Playing with “imaginaries,” boundless nihilism, and irony without boundaries turn into the imaginary nature of creativity. A writer of extraordinary talent turns into a figure of mass culture. Having created the world expected by admirers, the author becomes its prisoner. It is not the writer who guides the reader, but the audience who determines the space of artistic search that is recognizable to it. It is unlikely that such feedback will be fruitful for the writer, the literary process and, of course, the reader.

The prospects for the literary process in Russia are connected with other creative trends, with the enrichment of the artistic possibilities of realism. Its framework, as we see in the work of many modern writers, can be expanded even to modernist and postmodernist techniques. But at the same time, the writer retains moral responsibility to life. He does not replace the Creator, but only strives to reveal his plan.

And if literature helps a person clarify the time of his existence, then “every new aesthetic reality clarifies for a person his ethical reality” (I. Brodsky). Through familiarization with aesthetic reality, a person “clarifies” his moral guidelines, learns to understand his time and correlate his fate with the highest meaning of existence.

The literary process in Russia at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries inspires confidence that literature is still necessary for man and humanity and is faithful to the great purpose of the Word.

Soviet literature reading poetry

Bibliography

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