Article

Name: Deconstruction of Classicality in Vladimir Sorokin’s Novels

Authors: Aleksey I. Silantev

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article examines Vladimir Sorokin’s novels from the period of “socart” (“Norma”, “Marina’s Thirtieth Love”, “Roman”, “Hearts of Four”, “Blue Fat”) in the aspects of functioning of post-Soviet discourse in the narrative of these works, which is under-stood as the author’s ideologically accepted and poetically constructed narrative strategy for deconstructing the Soviet. The range of narrative forms of these novels is very wide – here there are developed instances of abstract and concrete narrator, coupled with the point of view of a key character in the plot structure of the work, here there are insert stories and other short narratives, up to narrative miniatures, as in the “Norma”, here there is direct narrative speech in the genres of personal writing and diary, and much more. The post-Soviet discourse itself mainly affects the instance of an abstract narrator, less often a concrete one. The principal feature of the narrative strategy of post-Soviet discourse in Sorokin’s version lies in the purposeful and, moreover, total criticism, up to the destruction, of Soviet classicality as such in all aspects of its representation in the author’s works, both in diegesis and in the discursive plan itself, and, ultimately, in the aspect of disintegration of the Soviet language itself.

Keywords: Vladimir Sorokin, novel, classicality, narrative strategy, post-Soviet discourse

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