15 representatives of postmodernism in modern Russian literature. Postmodern culture

The trend, called postmodernism, arose at the end of the 20th century and combined the philosophical, ideological and cultural moods of its time. Occurred and art, religion, philosophy. Postmodernism, not striving to study the deep problems of being, gravitates toward simplicity, a superficial reflection of the world. Therefore, the literature of postmodernism is aimed not at understanding the world, but at accepting it as it is.

Postmodernism in Russia

The forerunners of postmodernism were modernism and avant-gardism, which sought to revive the traditions Silver Age. Russian postmodernism in literature has abandoned the mythologization of reality, to which previous literary trends gravitated. But at the same time, he creates his own mythology, resorting to it as the most understandable cultural language. Postmodernist writers conducted a dialogue with chaos in their works, presenting it as a real model of life, where the utopia is the harmony of the world. At the same time, there was a search for a compromise between space and chaos.

Russian postmodern writers

The ideas considered by various authors in their works are sometimes strange unstable hybrids, designed to always conflict, being absolutely incompatible concepts. So, in the books of V. Erofeev, A. Bitov and S. Sokolov, compromises, paradoxical in essence, between life and death are presented. T. Tolstoy and V. Pelevin - between fantasy and reality, and Pietsuha - between law and absurdity. From the fact that postmodernism in Russian literature is based on combinations of opposite concepts: the sublime and the base, pathos and mockery, fragmentation and integrity, the oxymoron becomes its main principle.

The postmodern writers, in addition to those already listed, include S. Dovlatov, L. Petrushevskaya, V. Aksyonova. In their works, the main character traits postmodernism, such as the understanding of art as a way of organizing text according to special rules; an attempt to convey a vision of the world through organized chaos on the pages of a literary work; attraction to parody and denial of authority; emphasizing the conventionality of the artistic and visual techniques used in the works; connection within the same text of different literary epochs and genres. The ideas that postmodernism proclaimed in literature point to its continuity with modernism, which in turn called for a departure from civilization and a return to savagery, which leads to the highest point of involution - chaos. But in specific literary works one cannot see only the desire for destruction, there is always a creative tendency. They can manifest themselves in different ways, one prevail over the other. For example, Vladimir Sorokin's works are dominated by the desire for destruction.

Formed in Russia in the 80-90s, postmodernism in literature absorbed the collapse of ideals and the desire to get away from the orderliness of the world, so a mosaic and fragmentary consciousness arose. Each author has refracted this in his own way in his work. L. Petrushevskaya and her works combine a craving for naturalistic nudity in describing reality and the desire to get out of it into the realm of the mystical. The perception of the world in the post-Soviet era was characterized precisely as chaotic. Often in the center of the plot of postmodernists there is an act of creativity, and the main character is a writer. It is not so much the relationship of the character with real life that is explored, but with the text. This is observed in the works of A. Bitov, Yu. Buyda, S. Sokolov. The effect of literature being closed on itself comes out when the world is perceived as a text. Main character, often identified with the author, when faced with reality, pays a terrible price for its imperfection.

It can be predicted that, being focused on destruction and chaos, postmodernism in literature will one day leave the stage and give way to another trend aimed at a systemic worldview. Because sooner or later the state of chaos is replaced by order.

POSTMODERNISM IN LITERATURE - a literary trend that replaced modernity and differs from it not so much in originality as in the variety of elements, citation, immersion in culture, reflecting complexity, chaos, decenteredness modern world; the "spirit of literature" of the late 20th century; literature of the era of world wars, the scientific and technological revolution and the information "explosion".

The term postmodernism is often used to characterize the literature of the late 20th century. Translated from German, postmodernism means "what follows after modernity." As often happens with the "invented" in the 20th century. prefix "post" (post-impressionism, post-expressionism), the term postmodernism indicates both opposition to modernity and its continuity. Thus, already in the very concept of postmodernism, the duality (ambivalence) of the time that gave rise to it was reflected. Ambiguous, often directly opposite, are the assessments of postmodernism by its researchers and critics.

Thus, in the works of some Western researchers, the culture of postmodernism was called "weakly connected culture". (R. Merelman). T. Adorno characterizes it as a culture that reduces the capacity of a person. I. Berlin - like a twisted tree of humanity. According to the American writer John Bart, postmodernism is an artistic practice that sucks juices from the culture of the past, a literature of exhaustion.

Postmodern literature, from the point of view of Ihab Hassan (Dismemberment of Orpheus), in fact, is anti-literature, as it transforms burlesque, grotesque, fantasy and other literary forms and genres into anti-forms that carry a charge of violence, madness and apocalypticism and turn space into chaos .

According to Ilya Kolyazhny, the characteristic features of Russian literary postmodernism are "a mocking attitude towards one's past", "the desire to reach in one's homegrown cynicism and self-abasement to the extreme, to the last limit." According to the same author, "the meaning of their (i.e., postmodernists) creativity usually comes down to 'joke' and 'banter', and as literary devices, 'special effects', they use profanity and a frank description of psychopathologies ...".

Most theorists oppose attempts to present postmodernism as a product of the decay of modernism. Postmodernism and modernity for them are only mutually complementary types of thinking, similar to the worldview coexistence of the "harmonious" Apollonian and "destructive" Dionysian principles in the era of antiquity, or Confucianism and Taoism in ancient China. However, in their opinion, only postmodernism is capable of such a pluralistic, all-trying assessment.

“Postmodernism is evident there,” writes Wolfgang Welsch, “where a fundamental pluralism of languages ​​is practiced.”

Reviews about domestic theory postmodernism is even more polar. Some critics argue that in Russia there is no postmodern literature nor, moreover, postmodernist theory and criticism. Others claim that Khlebnikov, Bakhtin, Losev, Lotman and Shklovsky are "Derrida themselves." What's up literary practice Russian postmodernists, then, according to the latter, Russian literary postmodernism was not only accepted into his ranks by his Western "fathers", but also refuted Douwe Fokkem's well-known position that "postmodernism is sociologically limited mainly to university audiences." For ten s small years Russian postmodernist books have become bestsellers. (For example, V. Sorokin, B. Akunin (the detective genre unfolds not only in the plot, but also in the mind of the reader, first caught on the hook of a stereotype, and then forced to part with it)) and other authors.

World as text. The theory of postmodernism was created on the basis of the concept of one of the most influential modern philosophers (as well as a culturologist, literary critic, semiotician, linguist) Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, "the world is a text", "text is the only possible model of reality". The second most important theorist of post-structuralism is considered to be the philosopher, culturologist Michel Foucault. His position is often seen as a continuation of the Nietzschean line of thought. Thus, history for Foucault is the largest manifestation of human madness, the total lawlessness of the unconscious.

Other followers of Derrida (they are also like-minded people, and opponents, and independent theorists): in France - Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes. In the USA - the Yale School (Yale University).

According to the theorists of postmodernism, language, regardless of the scope of its application, functions according to its own laws. For example, the American historian Heden White believes that historians who “objectively” restore the past are rather busy finding a genre that could streamline the events they describe. In short, the world is comprehended by a person only in the form of this or that story, a story about it. Or, in other words, in the form of a "literary" discourse (from the Latin discurs - "logical construction").

Doubt about authenticity scientific knowledge(by the way, one of the key provisions of physics of the 20th century) led postmodernists to the conviction that the most adequate comprehension of reality is available only to intuitive - "poetic thinking" (M. Heidegger's expression, in fact, far from the theory of postmodernism). The specific vision of the world as chaos, which appears to consciousness only in the form of disordered fragments, has received the definition of "postmodern sensitivity".

It is no coincidence that the works of the main theorists of postmodernism are more works of art than scientific works, and the worldwide fame of their creators has overshadowed the names of even such serious prose writers from the camp of postmodernists as J. Fowles, John Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ronald Sukenick, Philippe Sollers, Julio Cortazar , Mirorad Pavic.

Metatext. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard and the American literary critic Frederic Jameson developed the theory of "narrative", "metatext". According to Lyotard (Postmodernist Destiny), "postmodernism should be understood as distrust of metanarratives." "Metatext" (as well as its derivatives: "metanarrative", "metaraskazka", "metadiscourse") Lyotard understands as any "explanatory systems" that, in his opinion, organize bourgeois society and serve as a means of self-justification for it: religion, history, science, psychology, art. Describing postmodernism, Lyotard claims that he is engaged in "search for instabilities", such as the "catastrophe theory" of the French mathematician René Thom, directed against the concept of "stable system".

If modernism, according to the Dutch critic T. Dana, “was largely substantiated by the authority of metanarratives, with their help” intending to “find consolation in the face of chaos, nihilism, which, as it seemed to him, had erupted ...”, then the attitude of postmodernists to metanarratives is different. They resort to it as a rule in the form of a parody to prove its impotence and senselessness.So R. Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America (1970) parodies the myth of E. Hemingway about the beneficial nature of the return of man to virgin nature, T. McGwaine in 92 No. shadows - parodies his own code of honor and courage.In the same way, T. Pynchon in the novel V (1963) - W. Faulkner's belief (Absalom, Absalom!) in the possibility of restoring the true meaning of history.

The works of Vladimir Sorokin (Dysmorphomania, Novel), Boris Akunin (The Seagull), Vyacheslav Pyetsukh (the novel New Moscow Philosophy) can serve as examples of metatext deconstruction in modern postmodern Russian literature.

In addition, in the absence of aesthetic criteria, according to the same Lyotard, it turns out to be possible and useful to determine the value of a literary or other work of art by the profit that they bring. "Such a reality reconciles all, even the most controversial trends in art, provided that these trends and needs have purchasing power." Not surprisingly, in the second half of the twentieth century. The Nobel Prize in Literature, which for most writers is a fortune, is beginning to be correlated with the material equivalent of genius.

"Death of the Author", intertext. Literary postmodernism is often referred to as "citation literature". Thus, Jacques Rivet's quotation novel Young lady from A. (1979) consists of 750 borrowed passages from 408 authors. Playing with quotes creates the so-called intertextuality. According to R. Barth, it “cannot be reduced to the problem of sources and influences; it is a common field of anonymous formulas, the origin of which is rarely found, unconscious or automatic quotations given without quotation marks. In other words, it only seems to the author that he himself creates, but in fact it is culture itself that creates through him, using him as its tool. This idea is by no means new: during the decline of the Roman Empire, the literary fashion was set by the so-called centons - various excerpts from famous literary, philosophical, folklore and other works.

In the theory of postmodernism, such literature began to be characterized by the term "death of the author", introduced by R. Barth. It means that each reader can rise to the level of the author, get the legal right to recklessly compose and attribute any meanings to the text, including those not remotely intended by its creator. So Milorad Pavic in the preface to the book The Khazar Dictionary writes that the reader can use it, “as it seems convenient to him. Some, as in any dictionary, will look up the name or word that interests them in this moment, others may consider this dictionary a book that should be read in its entirety, from beginning to end, in one sitting ... ". Such invariance is connected with another statement of postmodernists: according to Barthes, writing, including a literary work, is not

The dissolution of character in the novel, a new biographism. The literature of postmodernism is characterized by the desire to destroy the literary hero and the character in general as a psychologically and socially expressed character. This problem has been most fully elucidated English writer and literary scholar Christina Brook-Rose in Dissolving Character in the Novel. literary postmodernism work of art

Brooke-Rose cites five main reasons for the collapse " traditional character": 1) crisis " internal monologue"and other methods of "mind reading" of the character; 2) the decline of bourgeois society and with it the genre of the novel that this society gave rise to; 3) coming to the fore of the new "artificial folklore" as a result of the influence of the mass media; 4) the growth of the authority of "popular genres" with their aesthetic primitivism, "clip thinking"; 5) the impossibility of conveying the experience of the 20th century by means of realism. with all its horror and madness.

The reader of the "new generation", according to Brooke-Rose, increasingly prefers nonfiction or "pure fantasy" to fiction. This is why the postmodern novel and science fiction are so similar to each other: in both genres, the characters are more the personification of an idea than the embodiment of individuality, the unique personality of a person with “some kind of civil status and a complex social and psychological history.”

Brook-Rose's overall conclusion is: “Undoubtedly, we are in a state of transition, like the unemployed, waiting for a restructured technological society to emerge where they can find a place. Realistic novels continue to be made, but fewer and fewer people buy or believe in them, preferring bestsellers with their finely tuned seasoning of sensibility and violence, sentimentality and sex, mundane and fantastic. Serious writers have shared the fate of poets - elitist outcasts and closed in various forms of self-reflection and self-irony - from the fictionalized erudition of Borges to Calvino's cosmic comics, from Barthes's painful Menippean satires to Pynchon's disorienting symbolic search for who knows what - they all use the technique realistic novel to prove that it can no longer be used for the same purposes. The dissolution of character is the conscious sacrifice that postmodernism makes by turning to the technique of science fiction.

The blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction has led to the emergence of the so-called "new biographism", which is already found in many predecessors of postmodernism (from the self-observation essays of V. Rozanov to the "black realism" of G. Miller).

In a broad sense postmodernism- this is a general trend in European culture, which has its own philosophical base; it is a peculiar attitude, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a trend in literature and art, expressed in the creation of specific works.

Postmodernism entered the literary scene as a ready-made trend, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and currents: conceptualism and neo-baroque.

Conceptualism or social art.

Conceptualism, or sots art- this trend consistently expands the postmodernist picture of the world, involving more and more new cultural languages ​​(from socialist realism to various classical trends, etc.). Intertwining and comparing authoritative languages ​​with marginal ones (obscenities, for example), sacred with profane, semi-official with rebellious ones, conceptualism reveals the closeness of various myths of cultural consciousness, equally destroying reality, replacing it with a set of fictions and at the same time totalitarianly imposing on the reader their idea of ​​the world, truth, ideal. Conceptualism is mainly focused on rethinking the languages ​​of power (be it the language of political power, that is, social realism, or the language of a morally authoritative tradition, for example, Russian classics, or various mythologies of history).

Conceptualism in literature is represented primarily by such authors as D. A. Pigorov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, and in a transformed form by Evgeny Popov, Anatoly Gavrilov, Zufar Gareev, Nikolai Baitov, Igor Yarkevich and others.

Postmodernism is a trend that can be defined as neo-baroque. The Italian theorist Omar Calabrese, in his book Neo-Baroque, outlined the main features of this trend:

aesthetics of repetition: dialectics of the unique and repeatable - polycentrism, regulated irregularity, ragged rhythm (thematically beaten in "Moscow-Petushki" and "Pushkin House", the poetic systems of Rubinstein and Kibirov are built on these principles);

aesthetics of excess- experiments on stretching boundaries to the last limits, monstrosity (corporality of Aksenov, Aleshkovsky, monstrosity of characters and, above all, the narrator in Sasha Sokolov's "Palisandria");

shifting emphasis from the whole to a detail and / or fragment: redundancy of details, "in which the detail actually becomes a system" (Sokolov, Tolstaya);

randomness, discontinuity, irregularity as the dominant compositional principles, combining unequal and heterogeneous texts into a single metatext (“Moscow-Petushki” by Erofeev, “School for Fools” and “Between a Dog and a Wolf” by Sokolov, “Pushkin House” by Bitov, “Chapaev and Emptiness” by Pelevin, etc.).

unresolvability of collisions(forming, in turn, a system of "knots" and "mazes"): the pleasure of resolving the conflict, plot collisions, etc. is replaced by the "taste of loss and mystery."

The emergence of postmodernism.

Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by J. Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is the complete rejection of the old, the creation of the new at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dissipation of the solid meanings of any phenomenon. The center of any system is a fiction, the authority of power is eliminated, the center depends on various factors.

Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, reality disappears under a stream of simulacra (Deleuze). The world turns into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or by other people.

In this regard, we should also mention the concept of intertextuality, when the created text becomes a fabric of quotations taken from previously written texts, a kind of palimpsest. As a result, an infinite number of associations arise, and the meaning expands to infinity.

Some works of postmodernism are characterized by a rhizomatic structure, where there are no oppositions, no beginning and no end.

The main concepts of postmodernism also include remake and narrative. Remake is a new version already written work (cf.: texts by Furmanov and Pelevin). Narrative is a system of ideas about history. History is not a change of events in their chronological order, but a myth created by the consciousness of people.

So, the postmodern text is the interaction of the languages ​​of the game, it does not imitate life, as the traditional one does. In postmodernism, the function of the author also changes: not to create by creating something new, but to recycle the old.

M. Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodern principle of paralogy and on the concept of “paralogy”, highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western. Paralogy is “contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of intelligence as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of a binary situation, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of some one beginning, moreover, the possibility of the existence of an opposing one is recognized. The paralogic lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously, interact, but at the same time, the existence of a compromise between them is completely excluded. From this point of view, Russian postmodernism differs from Western:

focusing precisely on the search for compromises and dialogic interfaces between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a “meeting point” between the fundamentally incompatible in classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.

at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally “paralogical”, they retain an explosive character, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to contradictory integrity.

The category of simulacra is somewhat different. Simulacra control people's behavior, their perception, and ultimately their consciousness, which ultimately leads to the "death of subjectivity": the human "I" is also made up of a set of simulacra.

The set of simulacra in postmodernism is opposed not to reality, but to its absence, that is, to emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become a source of reality generation only under the condition of realizing their simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of the initial disbelief in their reality. The existence of the category of simulacra forces its interaction with reality. Thus, a certain mechanism of aesthetic perception appears, which is characteristic of Russian postmodernism.

In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation - Integrity according to the definition of M. Lipovetsky: “... even the most radical variants of the decomposition of integrity in the texts of Russian postmodernism are devoid of independent meaning and are presented as mechanisms for generating some “non-classical” models of integrity.”

The category of Emptiness also acquires a different direction in Russian postmodernism. According to V. Pelevin, emptiness “does not reflect anything, and therefore nothing can be destined on it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, and so much so that no tool that has entered into a confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Due to this, Pelevin's emptiness has ontological supremacy over everything else and is an independent value. Emptiness will always remain Emptiness.

Opposition Personal - Impersonal is realized in practice as a person in the form of a changeable fluid integrity.

Memory - Oblivion- directly from A. Bitov is realized in the provision on culture: "... in order to save - it is necessary to forget."

Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky deduces another, broader one - the opposition Chaos - Space. “Chaos is a system whose activity is opposite to the indifferent disorder that reigns in a state of equilibrium; no stability any longer ensures the correctness of the macroscopic description, all possibilities are actualized, coexist and interact with each other, and the system turns out to be at the same time all that it can be. To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of "Chaosmos", which takes the place of harmony.

In Russian postmodernism, there is also a lack of purity of direction - for example, avant-garde utopianism (in the surrealistic utopia of freedom from Sokolov's "School for Fools") and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, whether it is "dialectic of the soul" by A. Bitov, coexist with postmodern skepticism. or "mercy to the fallen" by V. Erofeev and T. Tolstoy.

A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - the author - the narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their permanent affiliation is the archetype of the holy fool. More precisely, the archetype of the holy fool in the text is the center, the point where the main lines converge. Moreover, it can perform two functions (at least):

A classic version of a borderline subject floating between diametrical cultural codes. So, for example, Venichka in the poem "Moscow - Petushki" tries, being already on the other side, to reunite in himself Yesenin, Jesus Christ, fantastic cocktails, love, tenderness, the editorial of Pravda. And this turns out to be possible only within the limits of the foolish consciousness. The hero of Sasha Sokolov is divided in half from time to time, also standing in the center of cultural codes, but without dwelling on any of them, but as if passing their flow through him. This closely corresponds to the theory of postmodernism about the existence of the Other. It is thanks to the existence of the Other (or Others), in other words, the society, in the human mind that all kinds of cultural codes intersect, forming an unpredictable mosaic.

At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism, which has reached out from Rozanov and Kharms to the present.

Russian postmodernism also has several options for saturating the artistic space. Here is some of them.

For example, a work can be based on a rich state of culture, which largely substantiates the content (“Pushkin House” by A. Bitov, “Moscow - Petushki” by V. Erofeev). There is another version of postmodernism: the saturated state of culture is replaced by endless emotions for any reason. The reader is offered an encyclopedia of emotions and philosophical conversations about everything in the world, and especially about the post-Soviet confusion, perceived as a terrible black reality, as a complete failure, a dead end (“Endless Dead End” by D. Galkovsky, works by V. Sorokin).

Lecture No. 16-17

Postmodern literature

Plan

1. Postmodernism in the literature of the twentieth century.

a) the reasons that led to the emergence of postmodernism;
b) postmodernism in modern literary criticism;
c) distinctive features of postmodernism.

2. "Perfumer" P. Suskind as a prime example postmodern literature.

1. Postmodernism in the literature of the twentieth century

A. Causes of Postmodernism

According to the majority of literary critics, postmodernism is “one of the leading (if not the main) trends in world literature and culture of the last third of the 20th century, reflecting milestone religious, philosophical and aesthetic development human thought, which gave many brilliant names and works. But it arose not only as a phenomenon of aesthetics or literature; rather, it is a certain special type of thinking, which is based on the principle of pluralism - the leading feature of our era, the principle that excludes any suppression or limitation. Instead of the former hierarchy of values ​​and canons, there is an absolute relativity and a plurality of meanings, techniques, styles, and assessments. Postmodernism was born on the basis of rejection of standardization, monotony and uniformity official culture at the end of the 50s. It was an explosion, a protest against the dull sameness of philistine consciousness. Postmodernism is a product of spiritual timelessness. Therefore, the early history of postmodernism turns out to be the history of the overthrow of established tastes and criteria.

Its main feature is the destruction of all partitions, the erasure of boundaries, the mixing of styles and languages, cultural codes, etc., as a result, "high" became identical to "low" and vice versa.

B. Postmodernism in modern literary criticism

In literary criticism, the attitude towards postmodernism is ambiguous. V. Kuritsyn feels “pure delight” for him and calls him “heavy artillery”, which left behind a trampled, “scold” “literary field”. "New direction? Not only. This is also such a situation, - wrote Vl. Slavitsky, is such a state, such a diagnosis in culture, when an artist, who has lost the gift of imagination, life perception and life-creation, perceives the world as a text, is engaged not in creativity, but in the creation of structures from the components of culture itself ... ". According to A. Zverev, this is literature of “very modest merits or simply bad literature". “As for the term “postmodernism,” D. Zatonsky reflects, “it seems to be only stating a certain continuity in time and therefore looks frankly ... meaningless.”

These opposing statements about the essence of postmodernism contain a grain of truth as much as the maximalist excesses. Like it or not, but today - postmodernism is the most common and fashion trend in world culture.

Postmodernism cannot yet be called art system, which has its own manifests and aesthetic programs, it did not become either a theory or a method, although as a cultural and literary phenomenon it became the subject of study by many Western authors: R. Bart, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, L. Fidler and others. Its conceptual apparatus is under development.

Postmodernism - special form artistic vision of the world, which manifests itself in literature both at the substantive and formal levels and is associated with a revision of approaches to literature and the work of art itself.

Postmodernism is an international phenomenon. Critics attribute to it writers who differ in their worldview and aesthetic attitudes, which gives rise to different approaches to postmodern principles, the variability and inconsistency of their interpretation. Signs of this direction can be found in any of the modern national literatures: in the USA (K. Vonnegut, D. Barthelme), England (D. Fowles, P. Akroid), Germany (P. Suskind, G. Grass), France (“ new novel", M. Welbeck). However, the level of "presence" of postmodernist style among these and other writers is not the same; often in their works they do not go beyond the boundaries of the traditional plot, the system of images and other literary canons, and in such cases it is legitimate to speak only about the presence of elements characteristic of postmodernism. In other words, in all the variety of literary works that the second half of the 20th century offers, one can single out examples of “pure” postmodernism (the novels by A. Robbe-Grillet and N. Sarrot) and mixed ones; the latter are still the majority, and it is they who provide the most interesting artistic examples.

The difficulty of systematizing postmodernism is explained, apparently, by its eclecticism. Rejecting all previous literature, he nevertheless synthesizes the old artistic methods - romantic, realistic, modernist - and creates his own style on their basis. When analyzing the creativity of one or another contemporary writer the question inevitably arises as to the degree to which realistic and non-realistic elements are present in it. Although, on the other hand, the only reality for postmodernism is the reality of culture, "the world as text" and "text as the world."

C. Distinctive Features of Postmodernism

With all the uncertainty of the aesthetic system of postmodernism, some domestic researchers (V. Kuritsyn, V. Rudnev) made an attempt to build a number of the most characteristic features of the direction.

1. What is common in postmodernism is the special position of the author, his multiplicity, the presence of a mask or double. In M. Frisch's novel "I'll call myself Gantenbein", a certain author's "I", starting from his observations, associations, thoughts, invents all sorts of "plots" (the story of the hero). “I try on stories like a dress,” says the author. The writer creates the plot of the work, creates its text in front of the reader. In "Elementary Particles" by M. Houellebecq, the role of the narrator is assigned to a humanoid creature - a clone.

The author, at his own discretion, models the world order in his work, shifts and pushes time and space apart at his whim. He "plays" with the plot, creating a kind of virtual reality (it is no coincidence that postmodernism arose in the era computer technology). The author sometimes connects with the reader: X. Borges has a miniature "Borges and I", in which the author claims that they are not enemies, not one person, but not different persons either. "I don't know which of the two of us is writing this page," the writer admits. But the problem of splitting the author into many voices, into a second "I" in the history of literature is by no means new, it is enough to recall "Eugene Onegin" and "A Hero of Our Time" or any of the novels by C. Dickens and L. Stern.

2. Intertextuality contributes to the mixing of epochs, expansion of the chronotope in the work, which can be considered as a kind of dialogue between texts of different cultures, literatures and works. One of the components of this technique is neomythologism, which largely determines the appearance of the modern literary process, but it does not exhaust the diversity of the intertext. Each text, according to one of the theorists of postmodernism in the West, R. Barth, is an intertext, because it relies on the full potential of the culture of the past, therefore, it contains different levels and in various representations, well-known revised texts and plots.

“Co-presence” in the text of the work of several “foreign” texts in the form of variations, quotations, allusions, reminiscences can be observed in P. Suskind’s novel “Perfumer”, in which the author ironically plays with the romantic style through the stylization of Hoffmann, Chamisso. At the same time, allusions from G. Grass, E. Zola can be found in the novel. In the novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman" by J. Fowles, the manner of writing by realist writers of the 19th century is ironically rethought.

Postmodernism became the first trend in the literature of the 20th century, which "openly admitted that the text does not reflect reality, but creates a new reality, or rather, even many realities, often not at all dependent on each other." There is simply no reality, instead of it there is a virtual reality recreated by the intertext.

3. Quotation has become one of the main principles of postmodernism. “We live in an era when all the words have already been said,” said S. Averintsev. In other words, every word, even a letter in postmodernism is a quote. Quotes cease to play a role additional information when the author makes a link to its source. It organically enters the text and becomes an inseparable part of it. The well-known tale comes to mind about an American student, who, having read Shakespeare's Hamlet for the first time, was disappointed: nothing special, a collection of commonplace winged words and expressions. In 1979, a quotation novel was published in France, which consisted of 750 quotations from 408 authors.

4. In works on postmodernism in recent times more and more people are talking about hypertext. V. Rudnev gives it the following definition: "Hypertext is a text arranged 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." The simplest example of hypertext is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each entry makes references to other entries in the same edition. The "Khazar Dictionary" of the Serbian writer Pavic is built as a hypertext. It consists of three books - red, green and yellow - which respectively contain Christian, Islamic and Jewish sources about the adoption of faith by the Khazars, and each of the religions insists on its own version. A whole system of references has been developed in the novel, and in the preface the author writes that it can be read as you like: from the beginning or from the end, diagonally, selectively.

In the hypertext, the author's individuality completely disappears, it is blurred, because it is not the author who acquires the predominant meaning, but the "Master Text", which provides for a plurality of readings. In the preface to the novel Discover, N. Sarrot writes: Characters these little dramas are words that act as independent living beings. When they have a meeting with other people's words, a fence is erected, a wall ... ". And so - "Open"!

5. One of the variations of hypertext is a collage (or mosaic, or pastiche), when a combination of ready-made style codes or quotations is quite sufficient. But, as one of the researchers rightly noted, intertext and collage are alive until the meaning of their constituent elements has disappeared in the mind of the reader. A quote can be understood only when its source is known.

6. The trend towards syncretism was also reflected in the language style of writing postmodernism, which deliberately becomes more complicated due to the violation of the norms of morphology and syntax, the introduction of pretentious metaphorical style, "low", profanity, vulgarisms or, on the contrary, the highly intellectual language of scientific fields (the novel " Elementary particles» Houellebecq, story «Party Right» by Welsh). The whole work often resembles one large extended metaphor or an intricate rebus (N. Sarrot's novel “Open”). A situation of a language game, characteristic of postmodernism, arises - the concept introduced by L. Wittgenstein in his "Philosophical Investigations" (1953), according to which the whole " human life- a set of language games”, the whole world is seen through the prism of language.

The concept of "game" in postmodernism receives a more expansive meaning - " literary game". The game in literature is a deliberate "installation of deception." Its purpose is to free a person from the oppression of reality, to make him feel free and independent, that's why she is a game. But in the end, it means the supremacy of the artificial over the natural, the fictional over the real. The work acquires a theatrical and conditional character. It is built on the principle of "as if": as if love, as if life; it reflects not what actually happened, but what "could be if ...". The vast majority of works of art recent decades The 20th century represents this “as if” literature. It is not surprising, therefore, that irony, mockery, and jokes play such a large role in postmodernism: the author “jokes” with his feelings and thoughts.

7. Postmodern innovations also touched the genre side of a work of art. V. Kuritsyn believes that secondary literary genres: diaries, comments, letters. The novel form affects the organization of the plot of works - it becomes fragmentary. This peculiarity in plot construction, which did not occur by chance, is a view of the novel as a mirror image of the very process of life, where there is nothing complete, and there is also a certain philosophical perception of the world. In addition to the works of M. Frisch, similar phenomena can be found in the work of F. Dürrenmatt, G. Bell, G. Grass, A. Rob Grilleu. There are works written in a dictionary form, and such definitions as “sandich novel” have appeared, combining romanticism and realism, mythoprese and document. There are other options, the novels "Elementary Particles" by M. Houellebecq and "The Collector" by D. Fause, in our opinion, can be defined as "centaur novels". There is a merger at the genre level of the novel and the drama, the novel and the parable.

One of the varieties of postmodernism is kitsch - " mass art for the elect." Kitsch may be a "well-made" work with a fascinating and serious plot, with deep and subtle psychological observations, but it is only an artful forgery. high art. In it, as a rule, there is no real artistic discovery. Kitsch uses the genres of melodrama, detective and thriller, he has an entertaining intrigue that keeps the reader and viewer in constant suspense. Unlike postmodernism, which can provide samples of really deep and talented works of literature, kitsch is set to entertain, and therefore it is closer to "mass culture".

A kitsch film was made from Homer's poem "The Odyssey" by A. Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky. Kitsch has become an indispensable addition to productions of Shakespeare's works, including Hamlet.

Postmodernism is an extremely colorful and extraordinary phenomenon in the literature of the second half of the 20th century. It contains many works of "transitional" and "one-day" works; Obviously, it is precisely such works that cause the largest number attacks on the direction as a whole. However, postmodernism has put forward and continues to put forward really bright, outstanding examples of artistic prose in the literature of Germany, Switzerland, France and England. Perhaps the whole point is the extent to which the author is passionate about "experimentation", in other words, in what capacity the "borderland" is presented in his work or a separate work.

2. "Perfume" by P. Suskind as a vivid example of postmodern literature

Novel Patrick Suskind Perfumer was first published in Russian translation in 1991. If you look for information about the author of the novel, there will be few of them. As many sources say, “Patrick Suskind leads a secluded life, refuses literary prizes, from any public speaking, rare cases when he agrees to a short interview.

P. Suskind was born on March 26, 1949 in the family of a professional publicist in the small West German town of Ambach. Here he graduated from high school, received a musical education, began to try his hand at literature. Later, in 1968-1974, P. Suskind studied the history of the Middle Ages at the University of Munich. Lived in Munich, then in Paris, published exclusively in Switzerland. World fame, which came to the author of "Perfumer", did not force him to lift the veil over his life.

P. Suskind started in the miniature genre. His true debut can be considered the mono-piece "Contrabass", completed in the summer of 1980. For the last ten years, P. Suskind has been writing screenplays for television, including screenplays for feature series.

The novel "Perfumer" (in another translation into Russian - "Aroma") takes a place in the world's top ten bestsellers. It has been translated into over thirty languages. This product is unique in its own way.

The novel by P. Suskind can be called without exaggeration the first truly postmodern German novel, farewell to modernity and the cult of genius. According to Wittstock, the novel is an elegantly disguised journey through the history of literature. The author is primarily interested in the problem of creativity, creative individuality, the cult of genius, which has been cultivated by German writers since the time of romanticism.

Of course, the problem of genius also worried the romantics in England and France, and in the "Perfumer" there are allusions to literary works these countries. But in German literature, the genius has become a cult figure, in the works German writers one can gradually trace the evolution of the image of a genius, its flourishing and degradation. In Germany, the cult of genius turned out to be more tenacious and, finally, in the 20th century, in the perception of millions of Germans, it was embodied in the sinister and mysterious figure of Hitler and turned into an ideology. The post-war generation of writers was aware of much of the blame for the literature that nurtured this cult. Suskind's novel destroys it by using a favorite method of postmodernism - "use and abuse", "use and insult", that is, the simultaneous use of some theme, style, tradition and demonstration of its failure, undermining, doubt. Suskind uses a huge number of works of German, French, English writers concerning the theme of genius, and with their help criticizes traditional ideas about originality, exclusivity creative personality. Suskind inscribes his novel into the tradition of the cult of genius, undermining it from within.

"Perfume" is a multi-level novel characteristic of postmodernism. Its genre, like any other postmodern work, is not easy to define, because the boundaries of genres in contemporary literature blurred and constantly violated. According to external signs, it can be attributed to the historical and detective genres. The subtitle "The Story of a Murderer" and the reproduction of Watteau's painting with a dead naked girl on the cover are clearly designed to attract a mass reader and clearly make it clear that this is a detective story. The beginning of the novel, where the exact time of the action is indicated, describes the life of Paris of that era, which is typical for a historical novel. The narrative itself is aimed at a wide range of reader interests: highly literary language, stylistic virtuosity, ironic play with the reader, description of private spheres of life and gloomy pictures of crimes. The description of the birth, upbringing, study of the protagonist suggest the genre of the novel of education, and the constant references to the genius, eccentricity of Grenouille, his extraordinary talent, which leads him through life and subjugates all other character traits and even the body, hint that we have a real novel about an artist, a genius.

However, none of the reader's expectations, caused by allusions to a particular genre, is not justified. For the detective, it is necessary that the evil be punished, the criminal exposed, the world order restored, none of these conditions in the novel is fulfilled. V. Fritzen called "Perfumer" a requiem for a crime novel. The value system of the upbringing novel is undermined. Grenouille's "teachers" have no feelings for him, except for hostility. Grenouille's education comes down to recognizing and remembering smells and mixing them in the imagination. Love, friendship, family relationships as factors of personality formation, without which it is impossible to imagine a novel of education, are absent here at all, the hero is completely spiritually isolated from the outside world. Until a certain time, Grenouille does not experience any feelings at all, as if from all the organs of perception he has only smell. The theme of love, compassion, friendship and others human feelings closed by Grenouille from the very beginning, when he voted with his first cry "against love, and yet for life." "He was a monster from the start." The only feeling that matures in Grenouille is disgust for people, but even this does not find a response from them. Having made people love himself, rejected and ugly, Grenouille realizes that they are disgusting to him, which means that he does not need their love. The tragedy of Grenouille is that he himself cannot find out who he is, and cannot even enjoy his masterpiece. He realized that people perceive and love only his fragrance mask.

The novel "Perfumer" can be called program work postmodernism, because with the help of a good literary language and an exciting narrative form, almost all the main postmodernist installations are embodied in it. Here there is a layering, and criticism of enlightenment, ideas about originality, identity, a game with the reader, farewell to the modernist longing for an all-encompassing order, integrity, aesthetic principles, which oppose the chaos of reality, and, of course, intertextuality - allusions, quotations, half-quotes - and stylization. The novel embodies the rejection of the totalitarian power of reason, of novelty, free handling of the past, the principle of entertainment, the recognition of a fictional literary work.

The fictitiousness of the protagonist, Grenouille, is emphasized from the very first lines: "... his genius and his phenomenal vanity were limited to a sphere that does not leave traces in history." Could not leave traces of Grenouille and because he was torn to pieces and eaten to the last shred in the finale of the novel.

In the very first paragraph, the author declares the genius of his hero, inextricably linked with evil, Grenouille is a "brilliant monster." In general, in the image of Grenouille, the author combines many features of a genius, as he was represented from romanticism to modernism - from the messiah to the Fuhrer. The author borrows these features inherent in a gifted individuality from various works - from Novalis to Grass and Böll. The grotesque combination of these traits into one whole is reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein's creation of his monster. The author calls his creation a "monster". It is devoid of almost all human qualities, except for hatred, a being rejected by the world and itself turned away from it, seeking to conquer humanity with the help of its talent. Grenouille's lack of his own smell means his lack of individuality, his own "I". His problem is that, faced with an inner emptiness, Grenouille does not try to find his "I". The search for fragrance should have symbolized the creative search for oneself. However, the genius of Grenouille can only create a skillful fake of human smell. He does not seek his individuality, but only masks its absence, which turns into the collapse and self-destruction of a genius in the finale.

On the image of Grenouille, V. Fritsen builds a whole history of the illness of a genius. First, since a genius must stand out from the crowd externally, he certainly has some kind of physical defect. The hero of Suskind bears the grotesque features of degeneration. His mother is sick, which means that he received a bad heredity. Grenouille has a hump, a disfigured leg, all sorts of serious illnesses left their marks on his face, he came out of the cesspool, "he was even less than nothing."

Secondly, a genius is anti-rational, always remains a child, he cannot be brought up, since he follows his own internal laws. True, the genius of romantics still had a teacher - this is nature. Grenouille, however, is his own work. He was born, lived and died as if contrary to all the laws of nature and fate, only by his own will. The genius of Suskind creates itself. Moreover, nature for him is bare material, Grenouille seeks to tear out her soul, decompose it into its component parts and, combining it in the right proportion, create his own work.

Thirdly, genius and intellect are not the same thing. Grenouille has a unique gift - his sense of smell. And yet everyone thinks he's stupid. Only by the age of four did Grenouille learn to speak, but he had problems with abstract, ethical and moral concepts: "... conscience, God, joy, gratitude ... were and remained vague for him." According to Schopenhauer's definition, genius combines great willpower and a large share sensuality - there is no question of reason. Grenouille is so obsessed with work and the desire to achieve power that it subordinates all his life functions (for example, work with Baldini, in Grasse).

Fourthly, the genius tends to madness, or at least to eccentricity, never accepting the norms of the layman's life. Therefore, in the eyes of a burgher, a romantic genius is always crazy, a child of nature, he does not take into account the foundations of society. Grenouille is a criminal a priori, he was sentenced already in the subtitle “The Story of a Murderer”, and Grenouille commits his first murder just having been born, with his first cry, which became a death sentence for his mother. And in the future, murder will be something natural for him, devoid of any moral coloring whatsoever. In addition to 26 murders committed already at a conscious age, Grenouille magically brings misfortune to people associated with him: Grimal and Baldini die, the Marquis disappears, Druot is executed. Grenouille cannot be called immoral, since all moral concepts that he could deny are alien to him. He is beyond morality, above it. However, Grenouille at first does not oppose himself to the world around him, disguising himself with the help of spirits. The romantic conflict is transferred to the inner sphere - Grenouille is faced with himself, or rather with the absence of himself, which is seen as a postmodern conflict.

Fifthly, the genius is an outsider of society, an exile. A genius lives in an imaginary world, in the world of his fantasies. However, Grenouille's outsiderness turns into autism. Due to the lack of smell, Grenouille is either simply ignored, or they feel an incomprehensible disgust for him. At first, Grenouille does not care, he lives in a world of smells. In the mountains, where he retires from the world, Grenouille creates a realm of scents, lives in a castle of scents in the air. But after the crisis - the realization of the absence of his own smell - he returns to the world in order to enter it, and people, deceived by Grenouille's "human spirits", accept him.

Sixth, a genius needs autonomy, independence. This is required by the egocentrism of a genius: his inner "I" is always more valuable and richer than the world. Loneliness is required for a genius for self-improvement. However, self-isolation is also a big problem for the artist. The forced isolation from the world of people was tragically perceived by the romantic hero-genius. Grenouille makes it not the world around him that rejects him, but the inner need to close in on himself. With his first cry, the newborn Grenouille opposed himself to the outside world and afterward endured all the cruel blows of fate with inhuman perseverance, moving towards the goal from the first years of his life, without even realizing it.

Finally, in the image of Grenouille, one can single out such a feature as the exclusivity of a genius, messianism, which is emphasized throughout the story. Grenouille was born for a certain highest goal, namely - "to carry out a revolution in the world of smells." After the first murder, his destiny was revealed to him, he realized his genius and the direction of his destiny: "... he was to become the Creator of smells ... the greatest perfumer of all time." V. Fritzen notices that in the image of the hero Suskind there is a myth about a foundling who must grow up to be the savior of his people, but a monster, the devil, grows up.

When Grenouille creates his first masterpiece - a human scent, by likening himself to God, he realizes that he can achieve even more - to create a superhuman fragrance to make people love him. Now he wants to become "the almighty god of fragrance... - in the real world and above real people". In Grenouille's rivalry with God, there is a hint of the myth of Prometheus, beloved by romantics. Grenouille steals from nature, from God the secret of the soul-aroma, but he uses this secret against people, stealing their souls. In addition, Prometheus did not want to replace the gods; he accomplished his feat from pure love to people. Grenouille acts out of hatred and a lust for power. Finally, in the bacchanal scene, the perfumer realizes himself as the "Grenouille", experiences " greatest triumph his life”, “Prometheus feat”.

In addition to the fact that the hero of Suskind combines almost all the features that writers from romanticism to modernism endowed with a genius, Grenouille goes through several stages of development - from romanticism to postmodernism. Until the departure to the mountains, Grenouille is stylized as a romantic artist. At first, he accumulates, absorbs odors, constantly creating new combinations of aromas in his imagination. However, he still creates without any aesthetic principle.

Grenouille the artist develops and, having met his first victim, finds in her the highest principle, according to which the rest of the fragrances should be built. After killing her, he realizes himself as a genius, recognizes his highest predestination. "He wanted to express his inner self, which he considered more worthwhile than anything the outside world had to offer." Therefore, Grenouille retires in the mountains for seven years. However, neither the secrets of the universe, nor the path of self-knowledge were revealed to him there. Instead of updating, Grenouille was faced with the absence of his own personality. Rebirth through death did not work, because there was no “I” that could be reborn. This internal catastrophe destroyed the world of his fantasies and forced him to return to the real world. He is forced to make a return escape - from himself to the outside world. As V. Fritzen writes, Grenouille leaves for the mountains as a romantic, and descends as a decadent: “On his “magic mountain”, the original artist grew old, turned into a decadent artist.”

Having got to the marquis-charlatan, Grenouille learns the art of illusion, creates a human fragrance, a mask that covered up the lack of his individuality and opened the way to the world of people. In Grasse, Grenouille mastered the science of perfumery, the technique of extracting scent. However, Grenouille's goal is no longer to revolutionize the world of scents. The first successful masterpiece allowed Grenouille to be so confident in his own genius that he is not content with simply accepting him among people, he wants to make them love themselves as God. The decadent genius degrades further - into the Fuhrer, when the desire for integrity and unity turns into totalitarianism. Napoleon, Bismarck, and Hitler are recognizable in the bacchanal scene in Grenouille. After the collapse of the monarchy, society longed for a Fuhrer genius and teacher, who was supposed to lead out of chaos, to unite. The parallels with Hitler are quite clear here. Documentary footage of Hitler's public speeches testifies to the mass ecstasy into which he plunged his listeners. In the bacchanalia scene, Grenouille, which does not have its own individuality, makes the others lose it too, people turn into a herd of wild animals. A work of art must resist the chaos of reality, while Grenouille, on the contrary, sows chaos and destruction around him.

Grenouille is finally a postmodern genius. He creates his masterpieces as a true postmodernist: not creating his own, but mixing what was stolen from nature and living beings, nevertheless getting something original, and most importantly - having a strong impact on the viewer/reader. According to V. Fritzen, Grenouille, the pseudo-genius of postmodernism, creates in own purposes, steals someone else's to blind his own. The postmodernism of the genius of Grenouille is also in the fact that it combines all the historical phases of the cult of genius with disappointment in it, the realization of its failure. Grenouille's creativity comes down to the fact that he steals the soul from nature, not much different from Baldini, the philistine, who steals the works themselves.

"Perfume" not by chance incurred accusations of epigonism, fashionable eclectic stylization, if only because the author is just revising the idea of ​​ingenious individuality, originality, following the concept of postmodernism. Indeed, the novel is extremely polyphonic, the voices of different eras and genres sound quite distinct. The novel is woven from allusions, quotes, half-quotes, themes and motifs of German and not only German literature. Suskind uses the technique of homogenizing quotes, themes, elements of other texts - according to the principle of perfume composition. The image of a genius, the idea of ​​creativity organize the narrative, and Hoffmann's short stories, mainly The Scuderi Maiden, are a coordinate system for orienting the reader. Suskind's novel is not a conglomeration of quotes, but a carefully constructed dialogue-game literary tradition, and with the reader, more precisely with his literary baggage. As for the decoding of the text, here the German reader is in a better position: most of the allusions in the novel are to the literary canon well known to Germans since childhood.

"Perfume" is a typical postmodern novel also because it is consciously secondary. This is a pastiche novel, a game novel, it can be subjected to endless interpretations, new allusions can be found. The secret of the reader's success of Suskind's novel, of course, is not only in wide advertising, but also in skillful stylization, a high-quality fake for a detective and historical novel. An entertaining plot and a good literary language provide the novel with attention both from the intellectual public and from the mass reader - a lover of trivial literature.

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Term "postmodernism" still causes controversy here and in the West. Introduced into circulation in the sixties, in a purely historical significance it refers to the culture of the West after the Second World War, to post-industrial society, to the era of consumer capitalism, new technologies, electronic communications. All this destabilizes and modifies traditional cultural mechanisms and, which is especially important for literature, leads to the loss of the privileged position of the book, text, work. The processes taking place in the culture of the postmodern era are described by scientists in different ways. Some consider postmodernism a continuation and development of modernism, and postmodern literature turns out to be simply a continuation of the trends of modernist literature on a new historical stage, then postmodernism is simply what follows after modernism. Others see in the culture of postmodernism a break with classical modernism of the first half of the century, others are busy looking for writers in the past whose work already carries the ideas and principles of modernism (with this approach, postmodernists turn out to be French writer of the late 18th century Marquis de Sade, American poet Ezra Pound, who is usually ranked among the classics of modernism, and many others).

One way or another, the term "postmodernism" itself indicates the connection of this phenomenon with the culture of the previous era, and postmodernism is aware of itself in relation to modernism. At the same time, modernism itself is subjected to constant revision, and postmodernist theorists offer the following system of contrasts that describe the difference between modernism in the first half of the 20th century and postmodernism. The following table is taken from the work of the American theorist I. Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" (1985).

Postmodernist theorists argue that postmodernism rejects the elitism and formal experimentation inherent in modernism, the tragedy in experiencing alienation. If modernism was the dehumanization of art, postmodernism is experiencing the dehumanization of the planet, the end of history, the end of man. If Joyce, Kafka, and Proust are all-powerful masters of the artistic worlds, they still believe in the ability of the word to express the essential truth about the human condition, in the eternal existence of a perfect work of art, then the postmodern artist knows that the word and language are subjective and, at best, can reflect some moments of an individual point of view, and a book bought in an airport kiosk, will be read during the flight, left at the exit of the plane, and it is unlikely that the reader will ever remember about it. Modernist literature still depicted the tragedy of the earthly existence of the individual, that is, the heroic principle was preserved in it; the postmodernist writer expresses the weariness of a person from life's struggle, the emptiness of existence. In short, in the era of modernism, the art of the word still retained a high value status in society, the artist could still feel like a creator and a prophet, and in postmodernism, art becomes optional, anarchic, ironic through and through.

At the heart of the literature of postmodernism is the concept of the game, far removed from romantic irony. The game in postmodernism fills everything and absorbs itself, leading to the loss of the purpose and meaning of the game. Postmodernists say that the time has come to abandon the traditional categories of the beautiful and the authentic, because we live in a world of one-day fakes, fake data, in a world of imitations. The shock of mankind from new historical circumstances that cannot be comprehended by consciousness alone (the Holocaust - the extermination of Jews during the Second World War; application nuclear weapons; environmental pollution; the ultimate leveling of the individual in modern Western democracies), leads to the loss of initial guidelines and a total revision of the value system, the very ways of thinking. The idea of ​​a single world order is being lost, and, consequently, of a single center of any system, any concept. It becomes impossible to distinguish the important from the unimportant, to single out main point any concept.

The idea of ​​the absence of absolutes, finite truths, the idea that reality is given to us only in the differences between its phenomena, was most consistently developed by the French post-structuralists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Francois Lyotard. These philosophers preached the rejection of all tradition classical philosophy, revision of the whole system scientific knowledge, and their unusually complex, "breakthrough" work, the final assessment will still give time.

The same exhaustion of rebellion, fatigue characterizes the attitude of postmodernists towards tradition. They do not dismiss it outright as their predecessors did: the postmodernist writer can be compared to a shopper in a supermarket of world history and world literature who rolls his cart down the aisles, looking around and dumping in it whatever catches his attention or curiosity. Postmodernism is a product of such a late stage of development Western civilization when "everything has been said" and new ideas in the literature are impossible; moreover, postmodern writers themselves very often teach literature at universities or are critics, literary theorists, so they easily introduce all these latest literary theories directly into their works, immediately parody and beat them.

In postmodern works, the degree of self-awareness, self-criticism within the text rises sharply; the writer does not hide from the reader how he achieves this or that effect, offers the reader for discussion the choices that the author of the text faces, and this discussion with the reader also takes on the character of a sophisticated game.

All the major writers of the late 20th century were to some extent affected by postmodernism, which is equally manifested in the old national literatures of the West (French "new novelists" - Nathalie Sarrot, Henri Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon; Germans - Günther Grass and Patrick Suskind; Americans - John Bart and Thomas Pynchon; British - Julian Barnes and Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie; Italians Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco), and in the heyday of the Latin American novel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar), and in the work of Eastern European writers (Milan Kundera, Agota Christoph, Victor Pelevin).

Let us turn to two examples of postmodern literature, which were chosen for purely pragmatic reasons: both belong to the greatest masters of postmodernism, are small in size and are available in Russian translation.