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• The transformation of the camp theme in Sergei Lebedev’s novel “Oblivion”

  Zsuzsanna Kalafatics

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  196

  Sergei Lebedev’s novel Oblivion offers an original reworking of the tradition of Russian camp prose. Its central themes are the legacy of Stalinist terror, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the necessity of a conscious resistance to their consequences. This paper explores how Lebedev, drawing on the concept of post-memory, intertwines personal family history with questions of collective memory, highlighting the destructive effects of silencing the past and the absence of accountability for historical crimes. At the core of this interpretation is an analysis of the narrator’s journey through space, time, and self-discovery, structured around the mythological motif of descent (katabasis). The funeral ritual plays a key role in the novel’s initiation structure: the symbolic burial and mourning of victims who vanished without a trace becomes an act of memory restoration, offering the possibility of reconciliation and a new beginning. Lebedev critically engages with contemporary Russian memory politics, stressing the moral imperative to uncover and give voice to the traumatic past.

• The artistic interpretation of biographical facts in L. Petrusevskaya's Ninth Volume

  Zsuzsanna Kalafatics

  Views:

  301

  The paper deals with the interpenetrability of the boundaries between artistic prose and autobiography and documentary. By analyzing Petrushevskaya's Ninth Volume, the paper examines how the rhetorical tropes of fiction operate in a text that is essentially autobiographical in nature, mixing different genres, and how archetypal, psychological and literary patterns are projected onto the biographical material. The cyclical arrangement of texts belonging to different periods and the blending of different discourses create the figure of a special autobiographical hero reflecting on the work.

• The Generational Narrative in Criticism of New Realism

  Zsuzsanna Kalafatics

  Views:

  360

  At the end of the 20th century, New Realism emerged in contrast to postmodern literature. The representatives of this school defined themselves in their manifestoes and critical writings as a generation with the same aesthetic and ideological principles. The anthology of New Russian Criticism, edited by Roman Senchin, is a demonstration of this common action. The present study aims to present how and what elements of this generational consciousness and cultural identity are created, i.e. how thinking about literature has changed.