“Early-printed” books in the metamodern context of Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel “The Slynx”. Archaic and avant-garde cultural trends

The article reveals the special role of books and book culture in the novel “The Slynx”, (“Kyss”), which is the centerpiece of T.N. Tolstoy’s work and which is hastily attributed by many critics and literary critics to the postmodernist tradition, whereas it is a novel of metamodernist type, in which modernist, postmodernist and romantic tendencies intertwine, conflictingly interacting and complementing each other. The writer has set herself a special artistic task of sharply condemning the ethics of golubchiki, and at the same time depicting their lives as interesting and fascinating. In particular, it applies to the absurd and in its own way brilliant project of reorganising the library in Kudeyar Kudeyarich’s terem (large house), which is carried out by Benedict, who actually creates an avant-garde installation that represents the de facto radical break with the whole traditional culture. The article also analyses the reasons for Benedikt’s sudden ethical degradation, which is not at all connected with the “metanarrative” search for the “main book”. The phenomenon of Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square”, about which the writer speaks in her essay “The Square”, plays a significant role here. According to Tatyana Tolstaya’s mythology, during the “Arzamas horror” Leo Tolstoy experienced the negative mystical impact of the “red and white square”, similar to Malevich’s paintings, and that had a fatal effect on the writer’s later work. In the novel world of Tatyana Tolstaya, the reproduction of the “Black Square” in an “old-time” art album has an even more devastating effect on Benedict, who turns into a Saniturion and a slynx.

book, metamodernism, postmodernism, Black Square, intellectuals, archaic, avant-garde

1. Lipovetskii, M.N. (2008), Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul’ture 1920-2000-kh godov [Paralogies. Transformations of the (post) modernist discourse in Russian culture of the 1920s - 2000s ], Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, Russia.

2. Losev, A.F. (2001), Dialektika mifa. Dopolneniya k «Dialektike mifa» [The dialectics of myth. Additions to “The Dialectics of Myth”], Mysl’, Moscow, Russia.

3. Hübner, K. (1996), Istina mifa [The truth of myth], Respublika, Moscow, Russia.

4. Epstein, M.N. (2001), Filosofiya vozmozhnogo [Philosophy of the possible], Aleteya, Saint Petersburg, Russia.