Text and Context

The book includes selected articles, notes, and speeches from several decades. The principle of the author's selection of texts is to demonstrate the movement of literature from the early 1980s to the mid-2020s. The first part is dedicated to works written during the stagnation, but in an atmosphere of anticipation of change, and starting from 1986, during the times of perestroika and glasnost. The second part presents the change in literary language and polemical works. The third part is devoted to the problems of the destruction and formation of the canon between eras, genre repertoire, fiction and non-fiction, autobiographical prose, as well as phenomena such as default and the devaluation of literature. The literary life in its various manifestations and institutions is closely traced. There are many heroes—from Yuri Trifonov and Fazil Iskander to Andrei Bitov, Vladimir Makanin, and Georgy Vladimov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Voinovich, Tatyana Tolstaya, Viktor Pelevin, Mikhail Shishkin, Vladimir Sharov... the list is long. There are also plenty of antiheroes. The heroes and antiheroes, personas and characters of the literary scene at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries fade into oblivion—or transition from text to text, continuing through time.