What and how modern Russian prose teaches us

Aleksei Tatarinov is a literary historian, a literary critic, Doctor of Philology, and Professor at Kuban State University.

Our modern prose continues to be engaged in the main endeavour of Russian literature, that is to create moral worlds and to struggle that these worlds would find a place in the lives of readers. The war of the "patriots" with the ‘liberals’ is beautiful in its artistic concreteness. Alexander Prokhanov’s "grotesque epic" does not replace Zakhar Prilepin’s "new realism", and the cult glorification of Doctor Zhivago (Dmitry Bykov, Mikhail Shishkin, and Lyudmila Ulitskaya) only reinforces the presence of ‘neo-gnosticism’ of Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin. Looking at the author’s worlds (Eugene Vodolazkin, German Sadulaev, Andrei Antipin, Mikhail Elizarov, Dmitrii Danilov, Roman Senchin, and Mikhail Tarkovsky to name just a few), we will discuss the prevailing intuition at the turn of the millennium, a feeling of the growing emptiness of the world and the loneliness of a person who comprehends the beauty of ice. To this end, you will have to remember several European names: Milan Kundera, Michel Houellebecq, and Julian Patrick Barnes. After all, more and more Hamlet, less and less Don Quixote! Why?