Marked Feat of Allusions in Roman Mikhailov’s Fairy Tales Collection «The Berries»

Abstract

Artistic experiments are characteristic of the latest Russian literature. The experiment allows not only to create the effect of a dialogue with the classics, but also to build a new model for assessing reality. The poetic world traditionally has two highways of balance: this is time and an artistic space. The poetics of postmodernism is focused on the creation of the new within the framework of the transformation of the existing. Aesthetic experience processed by postmodern authors has signs of allusions, reminiscences, quotations, open hints. Roman Mikhailov's prose is a unique example of playing with literary codes, cultural and historical stereotypes. This happens both at the level of form and at the boundary level of content. The new literary reality of assessing the present in the mode of fairy-tale narrative is being implemented in R. Mikhailovs collection The Berries (2019). Lately reseachers have been finding little interest in the collection, there are hadly any works found in the public domain that would concern the analysis of language, style, author's manner of narration, compositional framework, genre variations. Thus, the study in line with the assessment of the typology and poetics of Roman Mikhailov's fairy tales appears to be relevant. The methodological content of this work correlates with the one of a receptive and hermeneutic nature. Labeling of allusions in the collection The Berries is carried out for the purpose of visual differentiation of meanings. The scope of postmodern writers meanings expands to rhizome. Consequently, the text stops being only a formal plane, but becomes a paradigmatic sign system. The collection of fairy tales The Berries contains texts of different years. However, they form a single artistic world with related plots. The literary experiment of R. Mikhailov's fairy tales focuses on the texts by Sh. Perrault, F.M. Dostoevsky, N.A. Nekrasov, I.S. Turgenev, N.S. Leskov, A.P. Chekhov; N. Pogodin's screenplay; V. Suteev's cartoon plots; V.S. Vysotsky's song structure. The range of allusions in this case is wide, while the integrity of the cycle remains impeccable. This material can be used in studies on the poetics of the latest Russian prose, as well as in the invastigations focused on Roman Mikhailovs works.