The image of Russian life of the 90s through the veil of detective Alexandra Marinina "The Illusion of sin"

Abstract

The subject of the study is, on the one hand, the artistic reality of Alexandra Marinina's novel "The Illusion of Sin", on the other hand, the analysis of the peculiarities of Russian life of the 90s, presented through the prism of this novel. The author doubts that this work can be fully summed up under the concept of the detective genre, since the background is a description and understanding of the life of Russia at that time. It is also unclear to him why Marinina's novel is so named, in connection with which it concerns four novels by Diana Soul, named in the same way. The comparison of Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" and "The Illusion of Sin" allows us to formulate a hypothesis about the nature of Russian sociality. As before, two unrelated processes are impersonal, social (revolution, building socialism, war, the unexpected death of the USSR, reforms, etc., up to the present events) and unrelated and often meaningless, marginal actions and actions of people. From the point of view of this hypothesis, Marinina's work is considered: she, but naturally as an artist, represents for the reader the social reality of the 90s, which in many ways resembles the "bad sociality" that Vasily Zenkovsky wrote about back in the 20s of the last century. The author identifies four aspects of this sociality: the attitude of Russians to law stretching from the past centuries, the tradition of non-legal consciousness and behavior, a sense of social injustice, the lack of moral guidelines, the obsession of Russians with ideas, which M. Bakhtin wrote about.