Closing the Circle: On the Poetics of Contemporary Russian Prose

This article attempts to define trends in prose at the turn of the Millennium. Discussion focuses on the following issues in the context of “pluralist” postmodern aesthetics in Russia: ambiguity as multilingualism and its hero-intermediary, simulacra and homonymy, or the category of the “neo-real”, as Jean Baudrillard formulated it, in connection with stylization. Finally, it is maintained that the oversaturation of our contemporary culture with signs replacing reality has exhausted their potential “to mean” and invites the theme of Apocalypse as a last resort for producing meaning. Two ways out of this impasse seem to emerge in the mid-1990s: on the one hand, documentary genres; on the other, their opposite – the mythological novel. The aesthetic development of the 1990s seems, however, to have been impeded by the shrinking freedom of cultural expression in Russia.