Political Discourse and Artistic Fiction in Utopian Reality Representation
In Russian and Western literary studies, the peculiarity of Russian culture is often considered through the prism of Utopia. This article discusses the formation of an utopian metagenre in Russian ﬁ ction, tracing a change in emphasis from the political discourse to artistic means, and, conversely, archetypes that distinguish utopian world-modelling in different cultural epochs. Perhaps there is no better term than “Utopia” to characterize modern literature, where the avant-garde Utopias anticipate global communist Utopia that was formalized in artistic creativity through the theory of socialist realism, which in the 1950-1960s was replaced by retrospective Utopia of “the villagers” in the diversity of author's variants and technocratic Utopias of the “youth prose”. In this paradigm the place of postmodernism as a set of techniques used for opposing Utopian intentions is determined by the role of anti-Utopia.