ТРИКСТЕР В ОКРЕСТНОСТЯХ СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ТРАДИЦИОННОЙ ПРОЗЫ
TRICKSTER IN THE VICINITY OF TRADITIONAL MODERN PROSE

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the functioning of the Russian national archetypes in late traditional prose. The most important question the author analyses in the article is the possibility of an interpretational game, removal of national mythologemes in the late V. Rasputin’s works as an artist nationalist and dukhobor. Assuming the validity of the stated it should be noted that such different authors as V. Shukshin, V. Rasputin, V. Sorokin, D. Prigov, and T. Tolstaja are depolarized by the strategy of creative search, the result of which is far from being straightforward. The changed image of the world and humanity imprinted in the foreign literature at the turn of XX–XXI centuries demanded in essence a new character, adequate to the chaotic reality. The characters of ritual consciousness (weak-minded, wanderer, powerful man hero) are replaced by a player, trickster lacking in pathos, always ready for new challenges, adventures, and tricks. Namely this character who is able to engage in the dialogue with the imperfect world and sinful humanity, to provide “a chance for nongeneric ways” (V. X. Tropov). Acquisitions and losses of a hero-mediator revealed in V. Rasputin’s later texts are analysed in this article. The author, in the cycle of the stories aboutSenia Pozdnyakov, not only overdraws a sacral rural space of the village and the effective character, previously tagged as strictly negative, but also demonstrates the changes of the patriarchal world, and the loss of apotropous streght. The search for the innermost Rus as Kitezhgrad and Belovodye constituting the “inner plot” of contemporary traditionalists are replaced by the idea of time travelling. The hope of finding high ideals in external existence, the failure of which was emphasized by postmodern literature, is compensated by apprehending the internal, personal self dependent hero in time. V. Rasputin takes upon himself the exploration of the opportunities of trickster’s image who prefers a clever trick to an open battle with enemies. However, the author, at the end of a peculiar artistic experiment, rejects the very prospect of salvation of Russia and the entire world while using tricks: if the opening-meaning of the eclectic reality is given to the dissembler, then the vertical alignment of the world by (M. Bakhtin) is the mission of a poweful‑maiden-hero and through this image the deepest archaic strata of the national culture is actualized. The writer does not reject the transfigurative idea of existence by means of literature, but there are shifts of emphasis in its materialization. The disaster of social life and language deployed in the texts at the turn of the century is prevented by the efforts of characters, wanting to find a utopia as the last socially significant meaning to their own existence.

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