Article

Name: Narrative Strategies of Post-Soviet Discourse

Authors: Aleksei I. Silantev

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article examines the problem of the narrative strategy of post-Soviet discourse in its literary existence. Post-Soviet discourse is understood as a function of subject-active reflection of Soviet discourse. This reflection can take the form of direct ideological refutation or mythological debunking, or forms of naive denial, which was characteristic of the mass political consciousness of the 1990s, but at the same time it can take on poetically artificial forms and the function of deconstruction already in the zone of fiction itself – either through irony and parody, as in “Palisandria” by Sasha Sokolov, or through grotesque and surrealism, as in the works of Vladimir Sorokin, or through language play and symbolic ornamentalism of Victor Pelevin. Thus, post-Soviet discourse as a literary one acquires autopoetic potential and turns its subject – Soviet discourse – into an object of postmodern aesthetic transformation. And first of all, the narrative “direct speech” of Soviet discourse undergoes aesthetic transformation. This is the key narrative strategy of post-Soviet discourse. In place of the socialist realist narrative, which is straightforward in its meaning, come communicative events of ironic and parodic storytelling, grotesque images and surreal plots, the collapse of the classical narrative in the web of symbols of ornamentalism.

Keywords: post-Soviet discourse, narrative strategy, autopoiesis

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