"NEW REALISM" IN THE LITERATURE OF 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

The article is structured as a polemical response to a large-scale discussion about "new realism" in Russian literature during the first decade of the twentyfirst century. The article considers S. Shargunov's "Denial of Mourning" (2001) and V. Pustovaya's "Manifesto of a New Life" (2004), as well as A. Rudalev's "Catechism of the New Realism", (2011) a summary of the literary decade. The author discusses the inconsistencies in the theoretical substantiation of "new realism" as a new literary direction. Young critics' attempts to find stratifiers between modern and old realism struggled. The "new realists" are a culmination
of the convergence of these movements, ignoring postmodernism and dismissing the old tradition. Since it did not experience the Soviet era, when literature was a "state" issue dominated by the authorities, the younger generation who has come to literature has more freedom in terms of means and themes. The following are some of the key characteristics of the younger Russian
realists: linguistic looseness; disrupted literary succession ('emptiness'); a combination of elements of socialist realism and postmodernism; fragmentation of the image of reality; autobiographical reflexivity; and the authors' use of wide range of PR methods to encourage their imagination. The concept of "new," which corresponds to our time's realism, does not denote the emergence of a new literary direction, but rather a new axis of time, from which new themes are inserted into the existing direction and values are modified.