Postmodernism in Russian Literature comment reply. Postmodernism in literature
In Russian literature, the emergence of postmodernism dates back to the early 1970s. Only at the end of the 1980s did it become possible to speak of postmodernism as an irrevocable literary and cultural reality, and by the beginning of the 21st century, one has to state the end of the “postmodern era”. Postmodernism cannot be characterized as an exclusively literary phenomenon. It is directly related to the very principles of world perception, which manifest themselves not only in artistic culture, in science, but also in various spheres of social life. It would be more accurate to define postmodernism as a complex of worldview attitudes and aesthetic principles, moreover, opposition to the traditional, classical picture of the world and the ways of its representation in works of art.
In the development of postmodernism in Russian literature, three periods can be conditionally distinguished:
1. Late 60s - 70s (A. Terts, A. Bitov, V. Erofeev, Vs. Nekrasov, L. Rubinshtein, etc.)
2. 70s - 80s approval as a literary trend, the aesthetics of which are based on the post-structural thesis “the world (consciousness) as a text”, and the basis of the artistic practice of which is the demonstration of cultural intertext (E. Popov, Vik. Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, V. Sorokin, etc. )
3. Late 80s - 90s. period of legalization (T. Kibirov, L. Petrushevskaya, D. Galkovsky, V. Pelevin and others).
Modern postmodernism has its roots in the avant-garde art of the beginning of the century, in the poetics and aesthetics of expressionism, the literature of the absurd, the world of V. Rozanov, Zoshchenko's story, and the work of V. Nabokov. The picture of postmodernist prose is very colorful, many-sided, there are many transitional phenomena. Stable stereotypes of postmodern works have developed, a certain set of artistic techniques that have become a kind of cliche, designed to express the crisis state of the world at the end of the century and the millennium: “the world as chaos”, “the world as a text”, “crisis of authorities”, narrative essayism, eclecticism, play, total irony, "exposing the device", "the power of writing", its outrageous and grotesque character, etc.
Postmodernism is an attempt to overcome realism with its absolute values. The irony of postmodernism lies, first of all, in the impossibility of its existence, both without modernism and without realism, which give this phenomenon a certain depth and significance.
Domestic postmodern literature went through a certain process of "crystallization" before taking shape in accordance with the new canons. At first it was Wen's "different", "new", "hard", "alternative" prose. Erofeev, A. Bitov, L. Petrushevskaya, S. Kaledin, V. Pelevin, V. Makanin, V. Pietsukh, and others. its anti-utopia, nihilistic consciousness and hero, harsh, negative, anti-aesthetic style, comprehensive irony, quotation, excessive associativity, intertextuality. Gradually, it was postmodernist literature with its proper postmodernist sensibility and absolutization of wordplay that stood out from the general stream of alternative prose.
Russian postmodernism carried the main features of postmodern aesthetics, such as:
1. rejection of truth, rejection of hierarchy, assessments, of any comparison with the past, lack of restrictions;
2. attraction to uncertainty, rejection of thinking based on binary oppositions;
4. focus on deconstruction, i.e. restructuring and destruction of the former structure of intellectual practice and culture in general; the phenomenon of double presence, the "virtuality" of the world of the postmodern era;
5. The text allows an infinite number of interpretations, the loss of the semantic center that creates the space of the author's dialogue with the reader and vice versa. It becomes important how information is expressed, preferential attention to the context; the text is a multidimensional space composed of quotations referring to many cultural sources;
The totalitarian system and national cultural characteristics determined the striking differences between Russian postmodernism and Western postmodernism, namely:
1. Russian postmodernism differs from the Western one in a more distinct presence of the author through the feeling of the idea carried out by him;
2. it is paralogical (from the Greek paralogy answers out of place) in its essence and contains semantic oppositions of categories between which there can be no compromise;
3. Russian postmodernism combines avant-garde utopianism and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism;
4. Russian postmodernism is born from the inconsistency of the consciousness of the split of the cultural whole, not into metaphysical, but into the literal "death of the author" and consists of attempts within the same text to restore cultural organics through the dialogue of heterogeneous cultural languages;
Regarding postmodernism in Russia, Mikhail Epshtein stated in his interview for the Russian magazine: “In fact, postmodernism has penetrated much deeper into Russian culture than it might seem at first glance. Russian culture was late for the New Time holiday. Therefore, it has already been born in the forms of newmodern, postmodern, starting from St.<…>. Petersburg is brilliant with quotes, collected from the best examples. Russian culture, distinguished by the intertextual and citation phenomenon of Pushkin, in which Peter's reforms echoed. He was the first example of a great postmodern in Russian literature. In general, Russian culture was built on the model of a simulacrum (a simulacrum is a “copy” that does not have an original in reality).
The signifiers here have always prevailed over the signified. And there were no signifieds as such. Sign systems were built from themselves. What was assumed by modernity - the paradigm of the New Age (that there is a certain self-significant reality, there is a subject that objectively cognizes it, there are the values of rationalism) - has never been appreciated in Russia and was very cheap. Therefore, in Russia there was a predisposition towards postmodernism.
In postmodern aesthetics, the integrity of the subject, the human “I”, which is traditional even for modernism, is also destroyed: mobility, the uncertainty of the boundaries of the “I” leads almost to the loss of face, to replacing it with many masks, the “erasing” of individuality hidden behind other people’s quotes. The motto of postmodernism could be the saying "I - not_I": in the absence of absolute values, neither the author, nor the narrator, nor the hero is responsible for everything said; the text is made reversible - parody and irony become "intonational norms" that make it possible to give exactly the opposite meaning to what was affirmed a line ago.
Conclusion: Russian postmodernism, isolated from the West, a complex of worldviews and aesthetic principles that is different from the traditional picture of the world. Postmodernity in Russian literature is paralogical, there can be no compromise between its oppositions. Representatives of this trend, within the framework of one text, conduct a dialogue in “diverse cultural languages”.
Literary panorama of the second half of the 1990s. determined by the interaction of two aesthetic trends: realistic, rooted in the tradition of previous literary history, and new, postmodern. Russian postmodernism as a literary and artistic movement is often associated with the period of the 1990s, although in fact it has a significant prehistory of at least four decades. Its emergence was completely natural and was determined both by the internal laws of literary development and by a certain stage of social consciousness. Postmodernism is not so much aesthetics as philosophy, type of thinking, a way of feeling and thinking, which found its expression in literature.
The claim to the total universality of postmodernism, both in the philosophical and literary spheres, became obvious by the second half of the 1990s, when this aesthetics and the artists representing it, from literary outcasts, turned into the masters of thoughts of the reading public, which had greatly thinned by that time. It was then that Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, who deliberately shocked the reader, were put forward in place of the key figures of modern literature. The shock impression of their works on a person brought up on realistic literature is associated not only with external paraphernalia, a deliberate violation of literary and general cultural speech etiquette (the use of obscene language, the reproduction of jargon of the lowest social environment), the removal of all ethical taboos (a detailed deliberately underestimated image of multiple sexual acts and anti-aesthetic physiological manifestations), the fundamental rejection of a realistic or at least somehow vitally rational motivation for the character or behavior of a character. The shock from the collision with the works of Sorokin or Pelevin was caused by a fundamentally different understanding of the reality reflected in them; the doubt of the authors in the very existence of reality, private and historical time, cultural and socio-historical reality (the novels "Chapaev and Emptiness", "Generation P" by V. O. Pelevin); deliberate destruction of classical realistic literary models, natural rationally explainable cause-and-effect relationships of events and phenomena, motivations for the actions of characters, development of plot collisions ("Norm" and "Roman" by V. G. Sorokin). Ultimately - a doubt about the possibility of rational explanations of being. All this was often interpreted in the literary-critical periodicals of traditional realistically oriented publications as a mockery of the reader, literature, and man in general. It must be said that the texts of these writers, filled with sexual or faecal motifs, fully gave grounds for such a critical interpretation. However, severe critics unwittingly became victims of writers' provocation, followed the path of the most obvious, simple, and erroneous reading of the postmodernist text.
Responding to numerous reproaches that he does not like people, that he mocks them in his works, V. G. Sorokin argued that literature is “a dead world”, and the people depicted in a novel or story are “not people, They are just letters on paper. The writer's statement contains the key not only to his understanding of literature, but also to postmodern consciousness in general.
The bottom line is that in its aesthetic basis, the literature of postmodernism is not just sharply opposed to realistic literature - it has a fundamentally different artistic nature. Traditional literary trends, which include classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism and, of course, realism, are one way or another focused on reality, which acts as the subject of the image. In this case, the relation of art to reality can be very different. It can be determined by the desire of literature to imitate life (Aristotelian mimesis), to explore reality, to study it from the point of view of socio-historical processes, which is typical of classical realism, to create some ideal models of social relations (classicism or realism of N. G. Chernyshevsky, the author of the novel " What to do?"), directly influence reality, changing a person, "shaping" him, drawing various social masks-types of his era (socialist realism). In any case, the fundamental correlation and correlation of literature and reality is beyond doubt. Exactly
therefore, some scholars propose to characterize such literary movements or creative methods as primary aesthetic systems.
The essence of postmodern literature is completely different. It does not at all set as its task (at least it is declared so) the study of reality; moreover, the very correlation of literature and life, the connection between them is denied in principle (literature is "this is a dead world", heroes are "just letters on paper"). In this case, the subject of literature is not a genuine social or ontological reality, but the previous culture: literary and non-literary texts of different eras, perceived outside the traditional cultural hierarchy, which makes it possible to mix high and low, sacred and profane, high style and semi-literate vernacular, poetry and slang jargon. Mythology, predominantly socialist realism, incompatible discourses, rethought fates of folklore and literary characters, everyday clichés and stereotypes, most often unreflected, existing at the level of the collective unconscious, become the subject of literature.
Thus, the fundamental difference between postmodernism and, say, realistic aesthetics is that it is secondary an artistic system that explores not reality, but past ideas about it, chaotically, bizarrely and unsystematically mixing and rethinking them. Postmodernism as a literary and aesthetic system or a creative method is prone to deep self-reflection. It develops its own metalanguage, a complex of specific concepts and terms, forms around itself a whole corpus of texts that describe its vocabulary and grammar. In this sense, it appears as a normative aesthetics, in which the work of art itself is preceded by the previously formulated theoretical norms of its poetics.
The theoretical foundations of postmodernism were laid in the 1960s. among French scientists, post-structuralist philosophers. The birth of postmodernism is illuminated by the authority of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Yulia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Francois Lyotard, who created a scientific structural-semiotic school in France in the middle of the last century, which predetermined the birth and expansion of a whole literary movement both in European and Russian literature . Russian postmodernism is a phenomenon quite different from European, but the philosophical basis of postmodernism was created just then, and Russian postmodernism would not have been possible without it, however, like European. That is why, before turning to the history of Russian postmodernity, it is necessary to dwell on its basic terms and concepts developed almost half a century ago.
Among the works that lay the cornerstones of postmodern consciousness, it is necessary to highlight the articles of R. Barth "Death of an Author"(1968) and Y. Kristeva "Bakhtin, word, dialogue and novel"(1967). It was in these works that the basic concepts of postmodernism were introduced and substantiated: the world as a text, the death of the Author And the birth of a reader, scripter, intertext And intertextuality. At the heart of postmodern consciousness lies the idea of the fundamental completeness of history, which is manifested in the exhaustion of the creative potentials of human culture, the completeness of its circle of development. Everything that is now has already been and will be, history and culture move in a circle, in essence, are doomed to repetition and marking time. The same thing happens with literature: everything has already been written, it is impossible to create something new, the modern writer is doomed, willy-nilly, to repeating and even quoting the texts of his distant and near predecessors.
It is this attitude of culture that motivates the idea death of the Author. According to theorists of postmodernism, the modern writer is not the author of his books, because everything he can write was written before him, much earlier. He can only quote, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously previous texts. In essence, the modern writer is only a compiler of previously created texts. Therefore, in postmodernist criticism, "The author becomes smaller in stature, like a figure in the very depths of the literary scene." Modern literary texts creates scripter(English - scriptor), fearlessly compiling the texts of previous eras:
"His hand<...>makes a purely descriptive (and not expressive) gesture and outlines a certain sign field that has no starting point - in any case, it comes only from language as such, and it tirelessly casts doubt on any idea of a starting point.
Here we meet with the fundamental presentation of postmodern criticism. The death of the Author calls into question the very content of the text, saturated with the author's meaning. It turns out that the text cannot initially have any meaning. It is "a multi-dimensional space where various types of writing combine and argue with each other, none of which is original; the text is woven from quotations referring to thousands of cultural sources", and the writer (i.e. scriptor) "can only imitate forever what has been written before and has not been written for the first time." This thesis of Barthes is the starting point for such a concept of postmodern aesthetics as intertextuality:
"... Any text is built as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of absorption and transformation of some other text," wrote Y. Kristeva, substantiating the concept of intertextuality.
At the same time, an infinite number of sources “absorbed” by the test lose their original meaning, if they ever had it, enter into new semantic connections with each other, which only reader. A similar ideology characterized the French post-structuralists in general:
"The scriptor who replaced the Author does not carry passions, moods, feelings or impressions, but only such an immense dictionary from which he draws his letter, which knows no stop; life only imitates the book, and the book itself is woven from signs, itself imitates something already forgotten, and so on ad infinitum.
But why, when reading a work, are we convinced that it still has a meaning? Because it is not the author who puts the meaning into the text, but reader. To the best of his talent, he brings together all the beginnings and ends of the text, thus putting his own meaning into it. Therefore, one of the postulates of the postmodern worldview is the idea multiple interpretations of the work, each of which has the right to exist. Thus, the figure of the reader, its significance, increases immensely. The reader who puts meaning into the work, as it were, takes the place of the author. The death of an Author is the payment of literature for the birth of a reader.
In essence, other concepts of postmodernism also rely on these theoretical provisions. So, postmodern sensibility implies a total crisis of faith, the perception of the world by modern man as chaos, where all the original semantic and value orientations are absent. intertextuality, suggesting a chaotic combination in the text of codes, signs, symbols of previous texts, leads to a special postmodern form of parody - pastiche expressing total postmodern irony over the very possibility of the existence of a single, once and for all fixed meaning. Simulacrum becomes a sign that does not mean anything, a sign of a simulation of reality, not correlated with it, but only with other simulacra, which create an unreal postmodern world of simulations and inauthenticities.
The basis of the postmodern attitude to the world of previous culture is its deconstruction. This concept is traditionally associated with the name of J. Derrida. The term itself, which includes two prefixes opposite in meaning ( de- destruction and con - creation) denotes duality in relation to the object under study - text, discourse, mythologeme, any concept of the collective subconscious. The operation of deconstruction implies the destruction of the original meaning and its simultaneous creation.
"The meaning of deconstruction<...>consists in revealing the internal inconsistency of the text, in discovering in it hidden and unnoticed not only by an inexperienced, "naive" reader, but also by the author himself ("sleeping", in the words of Jacques Derrida) residual meanings inherited from speech, otherwise - discursive practices of the past, enshrined in the language in the form of unconscious mental stereotypes, which, in turn, are transformed just as unconsciously and independently of the author of the text under the influence of the language clichés of the era.
Now it becomes clear that the very period of publishing, which simultaneously brought together different epochs, decades, ideological orientations, cultural preferences, the diaspora and the metropolis, writers who are now living and who have died five to seven decades ago, created the ground for postmodernist sensitivity, impregnated magazine pages with obvious intertextuality. It was under these conditions that the expansion of postmodernist literature of the 1990s became possible.
However, by that time, Russian postmodernism had a certain historical and literary tradition dating back to the 1960s. For obvious reasons, until the mid-1980s. it was a marginal, underground, catacomb phenomenon of Russian literature, both literally and figuratively. For example, Abram Tertz's book Walks with Pushkin (1966-1968), which is considered to be one of the first works of Russian postmodernism, was written in prison and sent to freedom under the guise of letters to his wife. A novel by Andrey Bitov "Pushkin House"(1971) stood on a par with the book of Abram Tertz. These works were brought together by a common subject of the image - Russian classical literature and mythologemes, generated by more than a century of tradition of its interpretation. It was they who became the object of postmodern deconstruction. A. G. Bitov wrote, by his own admission, "an anti-textbook of Russian literature."
In 1970, a poem by Venedikt Erofeev was created "Moscow - Petushki", which gives a powerful impetus to the development of Russian postmodernism. Comically mixing many discourses of Russian and Soviet culture, immersing them in the everyday and speech situation of a Soviet alcoholic, Erofeev seemed to be following the path of classical postmodernism. Combining the ancient tradition of Russian foolishness, overt or covert citation of classical texts, fragments of the works of Lenin and Marx memorized at school with the situation experienced by the narrator in a commuter train in a state of severe intoxication, he achieved both the effect of pastiche and the intertextual richness of the work, possessing a truly limitless semantic inexhaustibility, suggesting a plurality of interpretations. However, the poem "Moscow - Petushki" showed that Russian postmodernism is not always correlated with the canon of a similar Western trend. Erofeev fundamentally rejected the concept of the death of the Author. It was the view of the author-narrator that formed in the poem a single point of view on the world, and the state of intoxication, as it were, sanctioned the complete absence of the cultural hierarchy of the semantic layers included in it.
The development of Russian postmodernism in the 1970s–1980s went primarily in line with conceptualism. Genetically, this phenomenon dates back to the "Lianozovo" poetic school of the late 1950s, to the first experiments of V.N. Nekrasov. However, as an independent phenomenon within Russian postmodernism, Moscow poetic conceptualism took shape in the 1970s. One of the founders of this school was Vsevolod Nekrasov, and the most prominent representatives were Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, and a little later, Timur Kibirov.
The essence of conceptualism was conceived as a radical change in the subject of aesthetic activity: an orientation not to the image of reality, but to the knowledge of language in its metamorphoses. At the same time, speech and mental clichés of the Soviet era turned out to be the object of poetic deconstruction. It was an aesthetic reaction to the late, dead and ossified socialist realism with its worn out formulas and ideologemes, slogans, and propaganda texts that made no sense. They were thought of as concepts, the deconstruction of which was carried out by conceptualists. The author's "I" was absent, dissolved in "quotations", "voices", "opinions". In essence, the language of the Soviet era was subjected to total deconstruction.
With particular obviousness, the strategy of conceptualism manifested itself in the creative practice Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov(1940–2007), the creator of many myths (including the myth about himself as a modern Pushkin), parodying Soviet ideas about the world, literature, everyday life, love, the relationship between man and power, etc. In his work, Soviet ideologemes about Great Labor, omnipotent Power (the image of Militsaner) were transformed and postmodernistically profaned. Mask-images in Prigov's poems, "the flickering sensation of the presence - absence of the author in the text" (L. S. Rubinshtein) turned out to be a manifestation of the concept of the Author's death. Parodic citations, the removal of the traditional opposition of the ironic and the serious determined the presence of postmodern pastiche in poetry and, as it were, reproduced the categories of the mentality of the Soviet "little man". In the poems "Here the cranes fly with a strip of scarlet ...", "I found a number on my counter ...", "Here I will fry a chicken ..." they conveyed the psychological complexes of the hero, discovered a shift in the real proportions of the picture of the world. All this was accompanied by the creation of quasi-genres of Prigov's poetry: "philosophers", "pseudo-verses", "pseudo-obituary", "opus", etc.
In creativity Lev Semenovich Rubinstein(b. 1947) a "harder version of conceptualism" was realized (M. N. Epshtein). He wrote his poems on separate cards, while an important element of his work became performance - presentation of poems, their author's performance. Holding and sorting through the cards on which the word was written, only one poetic line, nothing was written, he, as it were, emphasized the new principle of poetics - the poetics of "catalogs", poetic "card files". The card became an elementary unit of text, connecting poetry and prose.
"Each card," the poet said, "is both an object and a universal unit of rhythm, leveling any speech gesture - from a detailed theoretical message to an interjection, from a stage direction to a fragment of a telephone conversation. A pack of cards is an object, a volume, it is NOT a book , this is the brainchild of the “extra-Gutenberg” existence of verbal culture.
A special place among conceptualists is occupied by Timur Yurievich Kibirov(b. 1955). Using the technical methods of conceptualism, he comes to a different interpretation of the Soviet past than that of his senior comrades in the shop. We can talk about a kind critical sentimentalism Kibirov, which manifested itself in such poems as "To the Artist Semyon Faibisovich", "Just Say the Word "Russia"...", "Twenty Sonnets to Sasha Zapoeva". Traditional poetic themes and genres are not at all subjected to total and destructive deconstruction by Kibirov. For example, the theme of poetic creativity is developed by him in poems - friendly messages to "L. S. Rubinstein", "Love, Komsomol and spring. D. A. Prigov", etc. In this case, one cannot speak of the death of the Author: the activity of the author "is manifested in the peculiar lyricism of Kibirov's poems and poems, in their tragicomic coloring. His poetry embodied the worldview of a man at the end of history, who is in a situation of cultural vacuum and suffers from this ("Draft answer to Gugolev").
The central figure of modern Russian postmodernism can be considered Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin(b. 1955). The beginning of his work, which took place in the mid-1980s, firmly links the writer with conceptualism. He did not lose this connection in his subsequent works, although the current stage of his work, of course, is wider than the conceptualist canon. Sorokin is a great stylist; the subject of depiction and reflection in his work is precisely style - both Russian classical and Soviet literature. L. S. Rubinshtein very accurately described Sorokin's creative strategy:
"All his works - diverse thematically and genre - are built, in essence, on the same technique. I would designate this technique as "hysteria of style." Sorokin does not describe so-called life situations - language (mainly literary language), its state and movement in time is the only (genuine) drama that occupies the conceptual literature<...>The language of his works<...>as if he goes crazy and begins to behave inappropriately, which in fact is the adequacy of a different order. It is as lawless as it is lawful."
Indeed, Vladimir Sorokin's strategy consists in a ruthless clash of two discourses, two languages, two incompatible cultural layers. Philosopher and philologist Vadim Rudnev describes this technique as follows:
"Most often, his stories are built according to the same scheme. At the beginning, there is an ordinary, slightly overly juicy parodic Sotsart text: a story about a hunt, a Komsomol meeting, a meeting of the party committee - but suddenly it happens completely unexpectedly and unmotivated<...>a breakthrough into something terrible and terrible, which, according to Sorokin, is real reality. As if Pinocchio pierced a canvas with a painted hearth with his nose, but found there not a door, but something like what is shown in modern horror films.
Texts by V. G. Sorokin began to be published in Russia only in the 1990s, although he began to write actively 10 years earlier. In the mid-1990s, the main works of the writer, created in the 1980s, were published. and already known abroad: the novels "Queue" (1992), "Norma" (1994), "Marina's Thirtieth Love" (1995). In 1994, Sorokin wrote the story "Hearts of Four" and the novel "Roman". His novel "Blue Fat" (1999) gets quite scandalous fame. In 2001, a collection of new short stories "Feast" was published, and in 2002 - the novel "Ice", where the author allegedly breaks with conceptualism. Sorokin's most representative books are Roman and Feast.
Ilyin I.P. Postmodernism: Words, terms. M., 2001. S. 56.Postmodernism
The end of World War II marked an important turn in the worldview of Western civilization. The war was not only a clash of states, but also a clash of ideas, each of which promised to make the world perfect, and in return brought rivers of blood. Hence - the feeling of the crisis of the idea, that is, disbelief in the possibility of any idea to make the world a better place. There was also a crisis of the idea of art. On the other hand, the number of literary works has reached such a quantity that it seems that everything has already been written, each text contains links to previous texts, that is, it is a metatext.
In the course of the development of the literary process, the gap between the elite and pop culture became too deep, the phenomenon of “works for philologists” appeared, to read and understand which you need to have a very good philological education. Postmodernism has become a reaction to this split, connecting both areas of the multi-layered work. For example, Suskind's "Perfumer" can be read as a detective story, or maybe as a philosophical novel that reveals the issues of genius, artist and art.
Modernism, which explored the world as the realization of certain absolutes, eternal truths, gave way to postmodernism, for which the whole world is a game without a happy ending. As a philosophical category, the term "postmodernism" has spread thanks to the works of the philosophers Zhe. Derrida, J. Bataille, M. Foucault and especially the book of the French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979).
The principles of repetition and compatibility are transformed into a style of artistic thinking with its inherent features of eclecticism, a tendency to stylization, quoting, rewriting, reminiscences, allusions. The artist does not deal with "pure" material, but with culturally assimilated, because the existence of art in the previous classical forms is impossible in a post-industrial society with its unlimited potential for serial reproduction and replication.
The Encyclopedia of Literary Movements and Currents provides the following list of features of postmodernism:
1. The cult of an independent personality.
2. Craving for the archaic, for the myth of the collective unconscious.
3. The desire to combine, mutually supplement the truths (sometimes polar opposites) of many people, nations, cultures, religions, philosophies, the vision of everyday real life as a theater of the absurd, an apocalyptic carnival.
4. The use of an emphatically playful style to emphasize the abnormality, non-authenticity, anti-naturalness of the way of life prevailing in reality.
5. Deliberately bizarre interweaving of different styles of narration (high classic and sentimental or crudely naturalistic and fabulous, etc.; scientific, journalistic, business styles, etc. are often woven into the artistic style).
6. A mixture of many traditional genre varieties.
7. Plots of works - these are easily disguised allusions (hints) to well-known plots of literature of previous eras.
8. Borrowings, echoes are observed not only at the plot-compositional, but also at the figurative, linguistic levels.
9. As a rule, in a postmodern work there is an image of a narrator.
10. Irony and parody.
The main features of the poetics of postmodernism are intertextuality (creating one's own text from others'); collage and montage (“gluing” of equal fragments); use of allusions; attraction to prose of a complicated form, in particular, with free composition; bricolage (indirect achievement of the author's intention); saturation of the text with irony.
Postmodernism develops in the genres of fantastic parables, confessional novels, dystopias, short stories, mythological novels, socio-philosophical and socio-psychological novels, etc. Genre forms can be combined, opening up new artistic structures.
Günter Grass (The Tin Drum, 1959) is considered the first postmodernist. Outstanding representatives of postmodern literature: V. Eco, H.-L. Borges, M. Pavic, M. Kundera, P. Suskind, V. Pelevin, I. Brodsky, F. Begbeder.
In the second half of the XX century. the genre of science fiction is activated, which in its best examples is combined with prognostication (forecasts for the future) and dystopia.
In the pre-war period, existentialism arose, and after the Second World War, existentialism was actively developing. Existentialism (lat. existentiel - existence) is a direction in philosophy and a current of modernism, in which the source of a work of art is the artist himself, expressing the life of the individual, creating an artistic reality that reveals the secret of being in general. The sources of existentialism were contained in the writings of the German thinker of the 19th century. From Kierkegaard.
Existentialism in works of art reflects the mood of the intelligentsia, disappointed with social and ethical theories. Writers seek to understand the causes of the tragic disorder of human life. The categories of the absurdity of life, fear, despair, loneliness, suffering, death are put forward in the first place. Representatives of this philosophy argued that the only thing that a person has is his inner world, the right to choose, free will.
Existentialism is spreading in French (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre and others), German (E. Nossak, A. Döblin), English (A. Murdoch, V. Golding), Spanish (M. de Unamuno), American (N. Mailer, J. Baldwin), Japanese (Kobo Abe) literature.
In the second half of the XX century. a “new novel” (“anti-novel”) is developing - a genre equivalent of the French modern novel of the 1940s-1970s, which arises as a denial of existentialism. Representatives of this genre are N. Sarrot, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor, K. Simon and others.
A significant phenomenon of the theatrical avant-garde of the second half of the XX century. is the so-called theater of the absurd. The dramaturgy of this direction is characterized by the absence of a place and time of action, the destruction of the plot and composition, irrationalism, paradoxical collisions, an alloy of the tragic and the comic. The most talented representatives of the "theater of the absurd" are S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, E. Albee, G. Frisch and others.
A notable phenomenon in the world process of the second half of the XX century. became "magical realism" - a direction in which elements of the real and the imaginary, the real and the fantastic, the everyday and the mythological, the probable and the mysterious, everyday life and eternity are organically combined. It acquired the greatest development in Latin American literature (A. Karpent "єp, J. Amado, G. Garcia Marquez, G. Vargas Llosa, M. Asturias, etc.). A special role in the work of these authors is played by the myth, which is the basis of the work. A classic example of magical realism is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by G. Garcia Marquez (1967), where the history of Colombia and all of Latin America is recreated in mythical-real images.
In the second half of the XX century. traditional realism is also developing, which is acquiring new features. The image of individual being is combined with historical analysis, which is due to the desire of artists to understand the logic of social laws (G. Belle, E.-M. Remarque, V. Bykov, N. Dumbadze and others).
Literary process of the second half of the XX century. is determined primarily by the transition from modernism to postmodernism, as well as the powerful development of the intellectual trend, science fiction, "magic realism", avant-garde phenomena, etc.
Postmodernism was widely discussed in the West in the early 1980s. Some researchers consider Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake" (1939) to be the beginning of postmodernism, others - Joyce's preliminary novel "Ulysses", still others - American "new poetry" of the 1940s and 1950s, others think that postmodernism is not a fixed chronological phenomenon, and the spiritual state and “every epoch has its own postmodernism” (Eko), the fifth generally speak of postmodernism as “one of the intellectual fictions of our time” (Yu. Andrukhovych). However, most scholars believe that the transition from modernism to postmodernism took place in the mid-1950s. In the 60s and 70s, postmodernism covered various national literatures, and in the 80s it became the dominant trend in modern literature and culture.
The first manifestations of postmodernism can be considered such trends as the American school of "black humor" (W. Burroughs, D. Wart, D. Barthelm, D. Donlivy, K. Kesey, K. Vonnegut, D. Heller, etc.), the French "new novel" (A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarrot, M. Butor, K. Simon, etc.), "theater of the absurd" (E. Ionesco, S. Beckett, J. Gonit, F. Arrabal, etc.) .
The most prominent postmodern writers include the English John Fowles ("The Collector", "The French Lieutenant's Woman"), Julian Barnes ("A History of the World in Nine and a Half Chapters") and Peter Ackroyd ("Milton in America"), the German Patrick Suskind (" Perfumer"), Austrian Karl Ransmayr ("The Last World"), Italians Italo Calvino ("Slowness") and Umberto Eco ("The Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum"), Americans Thomas Pinchon ("Entropy", "For Sale No. 49" ) and Vladimir Nabokov (English-language novels Pale Fire and others), Argentines Jorge Luis Borges (short stories and essays) and Julio Cortazar (The Hopscotch Game).
An outstanding place in the history of the latest postmodern novel is also occupied by its Slavic representatives, in particular the Czech Milan Kundera and the Serb Milorad Pavić.
A specific phenomenon is Russian postmodernism, represented both by the authors of the metropolis (A. Bitov, V. Erofeev, Ven. Erofeev, L. Petrushevskaya, D. Prigov, T. Tolstaya, V. Sorokin, V. Pelevin), and representatives of the literary emigration ( V. Aksenov, I. Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov).
Postmodernism claims to express the general theoretical "superstructure" of contemporary art, philosophy, science, politics, economics, and fashion. Today they talk not only about “postmodern creativity”, but also about “postmodern consciousness”, “postmodern mentality”, “postmodern mentality”, etc.
Postmodern creativity involves aesthetic pluralism at all levels (plot, composition, figurative, characterological, chronotopic, etc.), completeness of presentation without evaluation, reading the text in a cultural context, co-creation of the reader and the writer, mythological thinking, a combination of historical and timeless categories, dialogue , irony.
The leading features of postmodern literature are irony, “quoting thinking”, intertextuality, pastiche, collage, and the principle of the game.
Total irony reigns in postmodernism, general ridicule and ridicule from all over. Numerous postmodern works of art are characterized by a conscious attitude towards an ironic juxtaposition of various genres, styles, and artistic movements. A work of postmodernism is always a mockery of previous and unacceptable forms of aesthetic experience: realism, modernism, mass culture. Thus, irony defeats the serious modernist tragedy inherent, for example, in the works of F. Kafka.
One of the main principles of postmodernism is quotation, and representatives of this trend are characterized by quotation thinking. The American researcher B. Morrissett called postmodern prose "citation literature". The total postmodern quotation comes to replace the elegant modernist reminiscence. Quite postmodern is an American student joke about how a philology student read Hamlet for the first time and was disappointed: nothing special, a collection of common catchwords and expressions. Some works of postmodernism turn into quotation books. So, the novel by the French writer Jacques Rivet "The Young Ladies from A." is a collection of 750 quotations from 408 authors.
Such a concept as intertextuality is also associated with postmodern quotation thinking. The French researcher Julia Kristeva, who introduces this term into literary criticism, noted: “Any text is built as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text.” The French semiotician Roland Karaulov wrote: “Each text is an intertext; other texts are present in it at various levels in more or less recognizable forms: texts of the previous culture and texts of the surrounding culture. Each text is a new fabric woven from old quotations.” Intertext in the art of postmodernism is the main way of constructing a text and consists in the fact that the text is built from quotations from other texts.
If numerous modernist novels were also intertextual (Ulysses by J. Joyce, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, T. Mann's Doctor Faustus, G. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game) and even realistic works (as Y. Tynyanov proved, Dostoevsky's novel "The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants" is a parody of Gogol and his works), it is the achievement of postmodernism with hypertext. This is a text constructed in such a way that it turns into a system, a hierarchy of texts, at the same time constituting a unity and a multitude of texts. Its example is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each entry refers to other entries in the same edition. You can read such text in an equal way: from one article to another, ignoring hypertext links; read all the articles in a row or moving from one link to another, carrying out "hypertext navigation". Therefore, such a flexible device as hypertext can be manipulated at one's own discretion. In 1976, the American writer Raymond Federman published a novel, which is called “At Your Discretion”. It can be read at the request of the reader, from any place, shuffling unnumbered and bound pages. The concept of hypertext is also associated with computer virtual realities. Today's hypertexts are computer literature that can only be read on a monitor: by pressing one key, you are transported to the hero's backstory, by pressing another, you change the bad ending to a good one, etc.
A sign of postmodern literature is the so-called pastish (from Italian pasbiccio - an opera composed of excerpts from other operas, a mixture, potpourri, stylization). It is a specific variant of parody, which changes its functions in postmodernism. Pastish differs from parody in that now there is nothing to parody, there is no serious object that can be ridiculed. O. M. Freudenberg wrote that only that which is “living and holy” can be parodied. For a day of non-postmodernism, nothing "lives", and even more so nothing is "holy". Pastish is also understood as parody.
Postmodern art is by its nature fragmentary, discrete, eclectic. Hence such a feature of it as a collage. Postmodern collage may seem like a new form of modernist montage, but it differs significantly from it. In modernism, montage, although it was composed of incomparable images, was nevertheless united into a whole by the unity of style and technique. In the postmodern collage, on the contrary, various fragments of the collected objects remain unchanged, not transformed into a single whole, each of them retains its isolation.
Important for postmodernism with the principle of the game. Classical moral and ethical values are translated into a playful plane, as M. Ignatenko notes, “yesterday’s classical culture and spiritual values live dead in postmodernity - its era does not live with them, it plays with them, it plays with them, it plays with them.”
Other characteristics of postmodernism include uncertainty, decanonization, carialization, theatricality, hybridization of genres, co-creation of the reader, saturation with cultural realities, “dissolution of character” (complete destruction of the character as a psychologically and socially determined character), attitude to literature as to the “first reality” (text does not reflect reality, but creates a new reality, even many realities, often independent of each other). And the most common images-metaphors of postmodernism are centaur, carnival, labyrinth, library, madness.
A phenomenon of modern literature and culture is also multiculturalism, through which the multi-component American nation has naturally realized the unsteady uncertainty of postmodernism. A more "earthed" multicult) previously "voiced" thousands of equal, unique living American voices of representatives of various racial, ethnic, gender, local and other specific streams. The literature of multiculturalism includes African-American, Indian, Chicano (Mexicans and other Latin Americans, a significant number of whom live in the United States), literature of various ethnic groups inhabiting America (including Ukrainians), American descendants of Asians, Europeans, literature of minorities of all stripes .
The postmodern trend in literature was born in the second half of the 20th century. Translated from Latin and French, “postmodern” means “modern”, “new”. This literary movement is considered a reaction to the infringement of human rights, the horrors of war and post-war events. It was born from the rejection of the ideas of the Enlightenment, realism and modernism. The latter was popular in the early twentieth century. But if in modernism the main goal of the author is to find meaning in a changing world, then postmodernist writers talk about the meaninglessness of what is happening. They deny patterns and put chance above all else. Irony, black humor, narrative fragmentation, mixing of genres - these are the main features characteristic of postmodern literature. Below are interesting facts and the best works of representatives of this literary movement.
The most significant works
The heyday of the direction is considered 1960 - 1980. At this time, novels by William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Philip Dick and Kurt Vonnegut were published. These are bright representatives of postmodernism in foreign literature. Philip Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1963) takes you to an alternate version of history where Germany won World War II. The work was awarded the prestigious Hugo Award. Joseph Heller's anti-war novel Catch 22 (1961) is ranked 11th on the BBC's Top 200 Books list. The author skillfully ridicules the bureaucracy here against the backdrop of military events.Modern foreign postmodernists deserve special attention. This is Haruki Murakami and his "Chronicles of a Clockwork Bird" (1997) - a novel full of mysticism, reflections and memories by the most famous Japanese writer in Russia. "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis (1991) amazes with cruelty and black humor even connoisseurs of the genre. There is a film adaptation of the same name with Christian Bale as the main maniac (dir. Mary Herron, 2000).
Examples of postmodernism in Russian literature are the books “Pale Fire” and “Hell” by Vladimir Nabokov (1962, 1969), “Moscow-Petushki” by Venedikt Erofeev (1970), “School for Fools” by Sasha Sokolov (1976), “Chapaev and Emptiness” Victor Pelevin (1996).
Vladimir Sorokin, a multiple winner of domestic and international literary awards, writes in the same vein. His novel Marina's Thirteenth Love (1984) sarcastically illustrates the country's Soviet past. The lack of individuality in that generation is brought to the point of absurdity. Sorokin's most provocative work, Blue Fat (1999), will turn all ideas about history upside down. It was this novel that elevated Sorokin to the rank of classics of postmodern literature.
Influence of the classics
The works of postmodern writers amaze the imagination, blur the boundaries of genres, change ideas about the past. However, it is interesting that postmodernism was strongly influenced by the classic works of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, the French philosopher Voltaire, the English novelist Lorenzo Stern, and the Arabic tales from the book One Thousand and One Nights. In the works of these authors there are parody and unusual forms of narration - the forerunners of a new direction.Which of these masterpieces of postmodernism in Russian and foreign literature have you missed? Rather, add to your electronic shelf. Enjoy reading and immersion in the world of satire, puns and stream of consciousness!
Modernism (French newest, modern) in literature is a direction, an aesthetic concept. Modernism is associated with the comprehension and embodiment of a certain supernatural, superreality. The starting point of modernism is the chaotic nature of the world, its absurdity. The indifference and hostility of the outside world towards a person lead to the realization of other spiritual values, bring a person to transpersonal foundations.
Modernists broke all traditions with classical literature, trying to create a completely new modern literature, placing above all the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; the artistic worlds they create are unique. The most popular topic for modernists is the conscious and the unconscious and how they interact. The hero of the works is typical. Modernists turned to the inner world of the average person: they described his most subtle feelings, pulled out the deepest experiences that literature had not previously described. They turned the hero inside out and showed everything obscenely personal. The main technique in the work of modernists is the "stream of consciousness", which allows you to capture the movement of thoughts, impressions, feelings.
Modernism consists of different schools: Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.
Representatives of modernism in literature: V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, E. Guro, B. Livshits, A. Kruchenykh, early L. Andreev, S. Sokolov, V. Lavrenev, R. Ivnev.
Postmodernism initially manifested itself in Western art, emerged as an opposition to modernism, open to the understanding of the elect. A characteristic feature of Russian literary postmodernism is a frivolous attitude to its past, to history, folklore, and classical literature. Sometimes this unacceptability of traditions goes to the extreme. The main techniques of postmodernists: paradoxes, puns, the use of profanity. The main purpose of postmodern texts is to entertain, to ridicule. These works for the most part do not carry deep ideas, they are based on word creation, i.e. text for the sake of text. Russian postmodern creativity is a process of language games, the most common of which is playing with quotes from classical literature. A motif, a plot, and a myth can be quoted.
The most common genres of postmodernism are diaries, notes, a collection of short fragments, letters, comments composed by the heroes of novels.
Representatives of postmodernism: Ven. Erofeev, A. Bitov, E. Popov, M. Kharitonov, V. Pelevin.
Russian postmodernism is heterogeneous. It is represented by two currents: conceptualism and social art.
Conceptualism is aimed at debunking, critical reflection on all ideological theories, ideas and beliefs. In modern Russian literature, the most prominent representatives of conceptualism are the poets Lev Rubinstein, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov.
Sots art in Russian literature can be understood as a variant of conceptualism, or pop art. All works of Sots Art are built on the basis of social realism: ideas, symbols, ways of thinking, the ideology of the culture of the Soviet era.
Representatives of Sots Art: Z. Gareev, A. Sergeev, A. Platonova, V. Sorokin, A. Sergeev
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