Max Frei and his fantastic bestsellers
The SPbU Representative Office invites you to the online lecture "Max Frei and his fantastic bestsellers", dedicated to the narrative of some aspects of literary mask poetics and commercially successful project, created by conceptual artists Igor Stepin and Svetlana Martynchik. The lecture will be given by Dmitry Baranov, teacher at the SPbU Department of history of Russian literature.
One of the most mysterious modern writers, who work in the direction of magical realism, in his fantastic bestsellers created the world without rules, where dreams merge with reality. Who is hiding behind the mask of Max Frei? Why fans sincerely believe his works are the medicine for those who suffering from severe form of passion for life and curiosity?
Max Frei’s works have notable features of both mass and elite intellectual literature. As will be demonstrated, the motivational analysis of the "The Labyrinths of Echo" cycle, published at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries, allows us to discover the relationship between a stable image system and the plot level.
The postmodern concept of equality of word and reality receives artistic rationale due to the fact that, as an attentive reader can notice, any phrase accidentally thrown by the characters (especially containing an erased trope or phraseological unit) can materialize in the objective world of the work — in the same story or in one of subsequent ones.
A special role in the system of such cases of materialization is played by speech patterns associated with the theme of doubts about the human nature of the main character, as well as with the theme of comparing the book and life. The corresponding motives, which consistently appear in all the stories, starting with the first, prepare the final plot twists of the cycle, because of which the boundaries between textual and extra-textual reality are blurred.
Lecturer
Dmitry Baranov, specialist of XX century Russian literature and theory of literature. The main area of his scientific interest includes researching works of different authors, mainly related to the tradition of postmodernism: Sasha Sokolov, Sergei Dovlatov, Victor Pelevin, Yevgeni Grishkovetz and others.
Lecturer’s separate area of research is the study of the possibilities of projecting classical methods of literary analysis on work with non-standard material, such as cinema and popular literature.
The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU — Russia’s first university.