The Constructed Nature of Fictional Characters in Russian Postmodernist Prose

Russian postmodernist writers have undertaken a thorough revision of the norms governing the construction of fictional characters. They have exploited a great number of experimental strategies to demonstrate that character is one of many components of narrative structure created and maintained by verbal means. The boldest and most striking strategies involve the category of extratextual characters which merge the historical and the fantastic and juxtapose divergent temporal and spatial dimensions. In the case of intertextual characters, Russian postmodernist writers introduce the most recognizable formulaic characters lifted from fairy tales and myths in order to expose their inherited and invented nature and to re-arrange their narrative functions. As for the largest category of intratextual characters, Russian writers subvert all the forms of direct and indirect characterization to indicate that fictional characters are completely rooted in language to the exclusion of any reference to an extralinguistic reality. It would not be an exaggeration to say, that Russian postmodernist texts use characters to flaunt their textuality and to foreground the fact that representational character is a mere convention.