“Homo post scriptum” in the drama works of A. Platonov and N. Erdman: traditions and innovation

Abstract

The problem of distinguishing text and reality is one of the main problems in the modernist culture of the twentieth century. The aim of a work is to show how the understanding of the world as a text, general to European cultural consciousness, is realized in the Russian literature of existential realism. The analysis is based on cultural-historical and historicalgenetic methods. At the center of the analysis is a type of character that has not previously been subjected to scientific understanding – “the person who has written”, “the person after writing”, “homo post scriptum”. In the picture of the world of Russian literature of existential realism of the 1920–1930s, the formula “life outside the text” is given as one of the ways to physically preserve oneself in an absurd reality. At the same time, reality itself, which destroys a person, breaks up into texts generated by itself, which represent only fragments of it. The mythological pan-semiotic integrity of the universe in the existential picture of the world is being destroyed, a total dehumanization of the text occurs. In the Russian literature of existential realism, the ideology of the worldview that we now call “postmodernism” is beginning to form. On the one hand, the Russian literature of existential realism is inscribed in the pan-European cultural context, and on the other hand, it continues the traditions of critical realism, where human actions are socially determined.