About the author
Pavel E. Spivakovsky (Moscow, Russia), PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Department of Modern Russian Literature and Contemporary Literary Process, Philological Faculty, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-0979-4404.
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Abstract
The article is devoted to the metaphorical image of pre-revolutionary Russian society in Vladimir Sorokin’s short story “Nastya”. Recreated in the exhibition traditionalist space of the estate is here the background for the demonstration of radical axiological changes in the minds of educated Russians at the turn of the XIX–XXth centuries. These changes are twofold. On the one hand, the writer interprets them as an ethical catastrophe: it is not by chance that they are metaphorically depicted as an act of cannibalism approved by almost all the heroes of the story, on the other handshows that transgressive avant-garde experiments with ethics and attempts to transform human nature are closely intertwined with very significant aesthetic achievements of the culture of the Silver Age. With this stems, in particular, and Gnostic transformation of Nastya in the final of the story. The article shows that the depth and tragedy of the depicted make us see in the story a metamodernist view of the world, free from the rigid restrictions of postmodern theory (the ban on seriousness, tragedy, the ban on non-ironic depiction of depth of being, etc.). All this creates a multidimensional metaphorical picture of the culture of the Silver Age, transgressed the limits and threw Russia into the improbability of the previously unthinkable.