Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most
controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a
prose writer in Moscow's artistic underground in the late 1970s and
early 80s, he ...became visible to a broader Russian audience only in
the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of
traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet
ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and
violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed from
nineteenth-century literature and Socialist Realism. Sorokin became
famous when the Putin youth organization burned his books in 2002
and he picked up neo-nationalist and neo-imperialist discourses in
his dystopian novels of the 2000s and 2010s, making him one of the
fiercest critics of Russia's "new middle ages," while remaining
steadfast in his dismantling of foreign discourses.
Vladimir Sorokin is the most controversial contemporary Russianwriter. He became famous when the Putin youth organization burned his books andhe picked up neo-imperialist discourses in his dystopian ...novels, making him oneof the fiercest critics of Russia's "new middle ages," while remainingsteadfast in his dismantling of foreign discourses.
The present work analyses the fiction of the post-Soviet Russian writers, Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Tuchkov and Aleksandr Khurgin against the background of the notion of post-Soviet Russian ...postmodernism. In doing so, it investigates the usefulness and accuracy of this very notion, proposing that of ‘post-Soviet neo-modernism’ instead. Common critical approaches to post-Soviet Russian literature as being postmodern are questioned through an examination of the concept of postmodernism in its interrelated historical, social, and philosophical dimensions, and of its utility and adequacy in the Russian cultural context. In addition, it is proposed that the humorous and grotesque nature of certain post-Soviet works can be viewed as a creatively critical engagement with both the past, i.e. Soviet ideology, and the present, the socially tumultuous post-Soviet years. Russian modernism, while sharing typologically and literary-historically a number of key characteristics with Western modernism, was particularly motivated by a turning to the cultural repository of Russia’s past, and a metaphysical yearning for universal meaning transcending the perceived fragmentation of the tangible modern world. Continuing the older Russian tradition of resisting rationalism, and impressed by the sense of realist aesthetics failing the writer in the task of representing a world that eluded rational comprehension, modernists tended to subordinate artistic concerns to their esoteric convictions. Without appreciation of this spiritual dimension, semantic intention in Russian modernist fiction may escape a reader used to the conventions of realist fiction. It is suggested that contemporary Russian fiction as embodied in certain works by Sorokin, Tuchkov and Khurgin, while stylistically exhibiting a number of features commonly regarded as postmodern, such as parody, pastiche, playfulness, carnivalisation, the grotesque, intertextuality and self-consciousness, seems to resume modernism’s tendency to seek meaning and value for human existence in the transcendent realm, as well as in the cultural, in particular literary, treasures of the past. The closeness of such segments of post-Soviet fiction and modernism in this regard is, it is argued, ultimately contrary to the spirit of postmodernism and its relativistic and particularistic worldview. Hence the suggested conceptualisation of post-Soviet Russian fiction as ‘neo-modernist’.
