Original scientific paper
The Soviet Past as Projection: Masculine Clinical (Social) Realism of Zakhar Prilepin
Danijela Lugarić Vukas
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
In contemporary Russia, the Russian and Soviet past is a battleground on which cultural, political, and social wars take place: the present and the future have become the dominants of the past as they are represented through its language and built on its image. According to Maria Stepanova, the past is a theater of shadows, and history is the projection capital that, as in many other transitional societies, replaces ideology, which – as tragic events from February 24, 2022, illuminate – can lead to disastrous consequences. Russian and Soviet past and history, as objects of continuous, often controversial adjustments, are also one of the central fields of thematization in Russian literature of the second decade of the 21st century, marked by a deep crisis of Russia’s symbolic order. This article offers an interpretation of the award-winning novel Obitel’ (Abode) by Zakhar Prilepin, which presents the author’s portrayal of the way prisoners in the Soviet camp behave in situations of existential crisis, in which the Gulag is displayed through the eccentric “aesthetics of urgency” (Ilya Kukulin, 2018) and disturbing romanticization of violence, where morality is understood as an exclusively discursive phenomenon, and collective trauma is reproduced (not processed) because it is transformed into the norm. Prilepin’s novel can be viewed in the context of the broader poetics of the “new realism”, which many influential scholars of contemporary Russian literature approach primarily as an ideological phenomenon in which violence has become a universal metalanguage of communication.
Keywords
Zakhar Prilepin; Abode; the Soviet past; camp prose; violence; commodification of trauma
Hrčak ID:
286009
URI
Publication date:
21.11.2022.
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