We're continuing our course, and in the seventh part of it, I'll turn to the literary situation of the 2000s. Trying to outline some trends that were emerging in that time. First, it was the time of complete final break with the traditions of Soviet literature. Many of the writers of the Soviet era, outstanding and even great writers have died in this decade: Chinghiz Aitmatov, [inaudible] Astafyev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and some others. Thick magazines, as we have said, remained at the level of free 5,000 copies per month. That is, they cease to play the leading role that they have been playing for almost two centuries. They were distributed mostly to the libraries. But at the same time, as far as the Internet was gaining force, the magazines acquired their new home. It's the magazine region room website on russ.ru, R-U-S-S dot R-U, where you can get acquainted with the novelties of literature that is published on thick magazines. The second trend is the continued argument between realism and postmodernism. We have some new excerpts. In the [inaudible] , postmodernism was perceived as innovation and as an attempt to catch up with western culture to join the world literary process, as part of general political and economic processes. But in practice, it turned out, and we say that the best part of Russian postmodernism was the one which was playing with the science of Soviet culture. We have seen that not only among conceptualist, poets, and [inaudible] , but even in the works of Tatyana Tolstaya and Mikhail Shishkin. The far the postmodern experiments go, the less readers they have. Even the main Russian postmodernist [inaudible] was gradually moving as we have seen the quiet traditional science fiction novels and dystopias. We'll talk about dystopias later. But now, I would like to say a few words about poetry. In this course, we pay little attention to poetry and I will try to fill this lacuna in this case. The loss of interest in poetry is a sign of the entire post Soviet era, but it manifested itself most vividly after the death of Joseph Brodsky because, in fact, interesting poetry is always interest in individuals, and great poets, and great personalities. After Joseph Brodsky died in New York in January 1996, even the experts, let alone the poets themselves, could not say who was the most interesting Russian poet. One of the critics, [inaudible] tried in the early 2000s to solve this problem in the most simple and direct way, by a vote. He started a vote on the internet to the question, who is the best Russian poet? As a result, three offers had won. Lev Losev, whose dates are 1937-2009, a friend and biographer of Joseph Brodsky and the strong sarcastic poet himself. Sergei Gandlevsky, born in 1952, a complex and classical poet, and Timur Kibirov, who was born in 1955, who can be called a conceptualist with a human face. Kibirov was very close to conceptualists in using ready-made cliches, but he's more humoristic, more playful, and sentimental at the same time. One can hardly say that one of these poets has wide acclaim outside the narrow circle of fence. There was no national poet to genuinely recognize poets as in previous decades. We can recall Sergei [inaudible] social poets of the '60s who had huge audience who were public poets, people's poets. At this time, perhaps only one poet Boris Ryzhy, whose dates are 1974-2001, a poet from Yekaterinburg who died early , who committed suicide, could claim the role of such people's poet, but on much smaller scale. In general, the print runs of the books of poetry among the there laureates of the major prizes rarely exceeded 200 copies. Poetry regions were visited just by poets themselves and by a small circle of their fans. In fact, poetry goes close to the scale of self-publishing of the '70s, to the scale of the sum is that. There were practically no genuinely recognized authorities, but there were a lot of non-professionals, or if you will, [inaudible] poetry. There is a sites to here, rustihi.ru, where tens of thousands of authors were publishing and are still publishing their verses. From tumult out on the internet, sooner or later some new names had to appear, and it happened by the end of the 2000s, the decade of 2000s when new famous poets appeared, and above all, [inaudible] , and [inaudible] who conquered the huge audience on the internet, and then performed poetry regions to the public collecting a large audience of lime. This trend continues in 2010s with new names appearing each year. As for the prose, which is mainly of interest to us in this course, here we can indicate a few new names. New names can be mentioned within the framework of postmodernism. For example, the name of the writer Mikhail Elizarov, who was born in 1973 in [inaudible] of Ukraine, which many call both the pupil and the follower of Vladimir Sorokin. Although in the reality despite the similarity of technical devices, Elizarov has a completely different content. At the time such his works as the Novella Nails was published, it's a mythical story about two children raised in the orphanage and interconnected not just by friendship, but by some mysterious deep link, when one cannot exist without the other. One of them becomes a great musician, a piano player, and the other remains in obscurity. The most famous texts by Elizarov was a novel called The Librarian published in 2008, which has won the Russian Booker Prize in the same year, one of the most prestigious awards in the fields of Russian literature, and it costed a big scandal. This is a strange story that combines the features of fantasy on the one hand and of the social art, may be of socialist realism, on the other hand. The plot of The Librarian is based on fantastic assumption. The books written by the writer, Gromov, a forgotten socialist realist, possess magical qualities. Any reader who would read these books completely without stops and without missing a single word, acquires supernatural powers. Each of his books gives difficult properties. As a result, the libraries, that is, the sects organized around such books, read by the librarians, their leaders and priest, lit wars among themselves. Not imitation of wars, but real fights. At the end, the main character finds himself in a dungeon where he's don't to read grammars books until the end of the centuries, until the doomsday, and only this action supports existence of Russia. So it's a phantasmagoria based on Russian literature centrism or Russian literary centrism. One more feature of the literature of the 2000s which should be mentioned here also is marginalization of literary criticism. Literary criticism is a very important phenomenon. We are not able to talk about it in detail now, but the expert community plays decisive role in establishing literary reputations. We may notice this book, but what comes into our field of vision almost always had passed through critical review for critical expertise. If a dozen of critics in one voice exclaim, new Google has arrived as Nicholai Nekrasov did. Then even those who know nothing about literature, read books by this new Google. So in the 2000s, the old forms of criticism associated with thick magazines fade into the background, and the glossy magazines have thrived. Literary views, some of them, do not contain detailed analysis of the texts. They oscillate between advertising and literary criticism. The literary reviewer has to retell the story, compare it to the other stories, evaluate, and advertise the writer. That is to do something that I'm doing right now in 10, 12 minutes of this lecture. The most prominent reviewer of 2000s was Lev Danilkin, who was born in 1974, a critic from official glossy magazine, a man who has read everything, as he was called. Who have written tens of thousands of reviews on all current literature. One of the most interesting authors who debuted in these years was a prose writer from [inaudible] , Aleksei Evanoff, whose works unfortunately have not yet been translated into English. I will talk about him in one of the last lectures. In the next lectures, we will address to the two tendencies of 2000s, which are still present in our days. Firstly, it is a dystopia boom, and secondly, the return of realism in the form of so-called new realism. Thank you.
