| Popis: |
Despite shrinkage in print runs and readership, canonical Literature during the 1990s developed along three major lines that connected writers of various generations in both aesthetics and philosophy: realism, exemplified in Georgii Vladimov's prize-winning novel, The General and His Army (1994); postmodernism, richly represented in the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sharov; and neosentimentalism, as derived from the naturalism of early perestroika, most consistently embraced by Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and, in his paternal profession de foi , one of Russia's chief theorists of postmodernism, Mikhail Epshtein. All three tendencies aspired to the status of mainstream, which they failed to attain, owing to a fundamental instability that chaos theory has labeled a "bifurcation cascade." Inasmuch as that stage, according to specialists in chaos theory, leads to irreversible changes that effect a high level of stability, the outlook for Russian literature at century's end might be less bleak than prophesied by doomsayers. |
