New Realism in Russian Prose of the Past Decade and the Tradition of the 1830s and 1840s

Abstract

In Russian prose of the past decade, a group of younger writers, supported by some critics, have defined their works as the literature of new realism. This article discusses this literary phenomenon in the broader context of the revival of traditions of realistic fiction in contemporary literature, looking for parallels between the characteristics of new realism and some forms of nineteenth-century realistic prose. – The phenomenon of new realism is first compared to the older concept of postrealism, thus highlighting the particular nature of its relation to the Russian postmodern literary tradition, and then its novelty and realism are analyzed in the light of the classical concepts of realism (such as indivisible unity of reality or transitivity). In this regard, new realism does not appear to be particularly new or original because it tries to reinstate the direct, unmediated literary view of reality. The only real difference is the reality that it tries to capture. Discursive complexity, formerly characteristic of literature itself, is now a part of a complex reality portrayed by literature, and the role of the writer is to discover which representations of reality are more real than others. To be capable of doing something, literature has to be completely unaware of its own discursive nature, which explains new realism’s “blindness” to every aspect of metaliterary writing. – This particular characteristic connects new realism to the natural school of the 1840s. Unlike the writers of the 1830s (Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov), the natural school discarded all established literary views in favor of the “languages of reality” and that, in combination with the artistic discoveries made by early realists, later led to the development of the great Russian realistic novel. This sheds some new light on new realism, which often viciously criticized the literary inadequacy of realism, which could also be viewed as an intermediate reductionist phase in the future development of Russian prose.