Article

Name: Cyclization of Short Prose in Modern Russian Literature

Authors: Igor V. Silantev

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

Russian literature at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries is marked by the systematic development of very short prose. Many people write it – novelists who are tired of large forms, poets who have felt an interest in the opposite type of artistic writing, as well as authors who initially form their poetics in this format. The format criterion in this case has a dual nature and functionality: the point of reference here is the actual volume of the text of the work, and the poetological result is the actual genre feature. A work of very short prose, as they often say, should fit into one screen shot, or one scan of a computer monitor, without scrolling. With this basic property, modern very short prose is fundamentally different from «short prose», traditional for Russian classical and modernist literature. The same property also denotes a fundamentally different sphere of existence and communicative functioning of very short prose – it is a computer and network communication, the Internet and social networks. A book composed of works of very short prose, if taken in the general range of fiction on the shelves in stores, looks rather ridiculous, unless it is limited to two dozen pages and a separate arrangement of texts on pages like poems. Actually, a collection of very short prose is closer to a collection of poems than a traditional prose book.

Keywords: Russian literature at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries, very short prose, genre, cyclization, collection

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