«Литература [...] — искусство обращения со словом»
"Literature [...] - the art of handling the word"

Summary/Abstract: This paper intends to present the innovation of stream of consciousness techniques by Sasha Sokolov in School for idiots within the theory of post-structuralism, William James’ concept of “consciousness” and the aspects of fictionality. The main stress is laid on how radically Sasha Sokolov renewed a special end of the 19th—first half of the 20th century novel tradition marked by Lewis Carroll, Dujardin, Proust, James Joyce, Faulkner, Vaginov. This article undertakes to demonstrate that Sasha Sokolov in 1970 took with his new concept of the deviant personality and intertextualism a step towards the postmodern, thereby considerably contributing to wind up normative restrictions then reigning soviet belles-lettres. In the narrator’s free schizophrenic act of speech, fighting for freedom against the power of persons in control, where the distance between presentation and representation is apparently abolished, strained relations between speaking and writing are created. There is no author’s intention which could direct the reception. Past, present and future, imagination and “reality” (within the scope of fiction), life and death are perceived to be reciprocally exchangeable. But despite this discursive way of “showing” the ill boy’s inner world, a considerable composing attitude prevails in the text, which is established by the exact mythological and quotational structure, made up mainly by motifs borrowed from Hermetism, by allusions to poems of Pushkin, Hölderlin or Rilke and short stories by Gogol' and Poe.

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