Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The literary situation: publication, genres, criticism
- 2 From “stagnation” to “openness”
- 3 Retrospective writing about the Stalin period
- 4 Village prose: its peak and decline
- 5 The “forty-year-olds”
- 6 Other voices
- 7 “Tough” and “cruel” prose
- 8 New faces
- 9 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- English translations of Soviet Russian prose
- Index
7 - “Tough” and “cruel” prose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The literary situation: publication, genres, criticism
- 2 From “stagnation” to “openness”
- 3 Retrospective writing about the Stalin period
- 4 Village prose: its peak and decline
- 5 The “forty-year-olds”
- 6 Other voices
- 7 “Tough” and “cruel” prose
- 8 New faces
- 9 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- English translations of Soviet Russian prose
- Index
Summary
Early in 1989, the critic Sergei Chuprinin introduced the term drugaya proza – “other prose” or, more precisely in the given context, “alternative prose.” Since then, Chuprinin's definition, augmented by the contributions of numerous other critics, has been applied to a growing body of writing that differs from the standard critical realism of the glasnosť period. The term came to signify a large and loose category of prose that was distinguished not by its political content (although it was generally liberal in tone) but by innovation in language, style, and narrative point of view. In the Soviet context much of this “alternative” literature was original, challenging, and even shocking, although by contemporary Western standards it did not seem notably daring or uninhibited.
The main characteristic of “alternative” prose is its emphatically literary orientation. Although it does not entirely repudiate the traditional sense of civic, social, or moral responsibility of a Tolstoy, Tendryakov, or Trifonov, it is much more concerned with unique angles of vision and with freshness and inventiveness of expression than it is with any educational mission. Its writers are interested, first of all, in exploring aesthetic possibilities, widening horizons, cultivating their creative idiosyncrasies, and developing away from the conventions of recent decades. Tatyana Tolstaya, for example, is frequently numbered among them, as is Mikhail Kuraev.
As a large aesthetic reaction against the restrains and taboos of the past, “alternative” prose has no particular ideological axe to grind.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Last Years of Soviet Russian LiteratureProse Fiction 1975–1991, pp. 147 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993