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• On the threshold of change: Annamária Vass: Down with Socialist realism – Long live postmodernism! Paradigm shift in Russian literature in the second half of the 1980s. Debrecen, Debrecen University Press, 2024, pp. 184. ISBN: 978-963-615-163-8

  Nárcisz Gajdos

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  185

  The review examines a new book by Hungarian researcher Annamária Vass on paradigm shift in Russian literature. The volume analyses in detail the literary and cultural changes that began in the mid-1980s, shedding light on how socialist realism was transformed into postmodernism. Annamária Vass focuses on understanding the characteristics of postmodernism and provides a fascinating historical overview of how socialist realism gradually lost its dominance. By analysing the works of Yevgeny Popov and Vasily Aksyonov demonstrate the specific characteristics of postmodern literature. The volume provides an excellent overview of this chaotic period of Russian literature.

• The Function of the „Author’s Mask” in “The Soul of a Patriot or Various Epistles to Ferfichkin” by Yevgeni Popov

  Annamária Vass

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  296

  Playing with the author’s figure is not a new device in Postmodernism. One may refer to “Either/Or” by Søren Kierkegaard or “The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin” by Alexander Pushkin, or “The Fiery Angel” by Valery Bryusov. At the same time the foreword of “The soul of a patriot or Various epistles to Ferfichkin” proves that in Postmodernism this game is taken to the next level. The author who abandoned their fictional space and renounced theirauthorial role during Modernism returns and re-takes their formal place. However, he does not do it seriously but hiding behind the mask of the author – says Malmgren, introducing the term of the author’s maskinto literary discourse. In this analysis I state that Popov, using the author’s mask, turns the traditional interpretationof the author’s role inside out.  I conclude that, on the one hand, the author’s mask ridicules the concept by which the author’s biography is the key to his work. On the other hand, it makes fun of Vinogradov’s view, according to which there is always an abstract author hiding in the text who carries its real meaning. I come to the conclusion, that Popov uses this narrative technique to emphasise that it is impossible to look at a literary work as an arsenal of ultimate truths and statements. 

• Aglaya Returns Home, The Mystery of The Apocryph of Aglaia. Ed. by Elena Kozmina. INTMEDIA, Yekaterinburg 2020, 231 pp. ISBN 978-5-6040560-8-0

  Lajos Pálfalvi

  Views:

  226

  This collection of studies is a unique example of a collective monograph written by Russian, Polish and Hungarian scholars on a contemporary Polish literary work. The novel by Jerzy Sosnowski entitled Aglaia’s Apocrypha is an ideal subject of analysis because of its complicated narrative structure, multilevel composition and genre complexity. The authors of the studies describe the connections between the storytellers and the author, define the context of the novel both in high and popularculture. Some of them represent the best traditions of Russian poetics of prose. Jerzy Sosnowski began his career as a literary critic and literary historian, he was an influential interpreter and promoter of the new tendencies in the Polish literature of the eighties.When he became a prosewriter, he followed the new aesthetic trend of Polish postmodernism. Jerzy Sosnowski as the author of a novel written about an erotic cyborg, its/her admirer and the operator was a forerunner of posthumanism.