New realism in Russian literature of the 2000s and the prose of Evgenii Grishkovets
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Date
2015
Authors
Kolmakov, Ekaterina
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Abstract
The thesis focuses on the textual representations of everyday experiences in short stories by Evgenii Grishkovets in the collections Planka (Plank, 2006) and Sledy na mne (Traces on Me, 2007). It reviews the literary environment of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and new realism is defined as a new literary trend, incorporating the elements of previously prominent realist and postmodernist traditions, and determined as partially a reaction to these. Grishkovets’ short stories are analyzed through the prism of Henri Lefebvre's theory of “everydayness,” including the latter’s concepts of alienations (the feeling of being foreign or estranged to oneself and some or all elements of one’s existence), moments (instances of true insight into a situation or experience) and presence (an individual’s experience of the authentic in an everyday situation). Through the analysis of the texts, an effort is made to determine the instances when Grishkovets’ characters reach the state of Lefebvre's total man, a person whose perception is not clouded by the alienations, and the concept of Russia’s ‘new hero’ in literature is discussed in correlation with Lefebvre's total man.
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Keywords
Grishkovets, Russian literature, Russia in 2000s, New realism