The phenomenon of the underground writing in the prose by Yuz Aleshkovsky

   The article is devoted to the concept of “underground writing”, which is new to Russian literary criticism. The authors describe its main features: oral (conversational) oriented trend, free writing without a clear plan, discreteness, inconsistency and narrative eclecticism. The article highlights the first person narration (skaz) and the image of a narrator. We study the social affiliation of the character-narrator through his language expression. Based on the revealed techniques of extravaganza, carnival grotesque, absurdity, satire and phantasmagoria, an attempt is made to identify the type of underground writing in the texts of the prose writer Yuz Aleshkovsky in his pre-emigrant period. As a result of our study of Yuz Aleshkovsky’s early novelettes narrative peculiarities, we have identified a special type of underground writing generally characteristic of the prose of forty-year-olds: oral, based on the effect of a reader’s eavesdropping; freely discoursing on sex; using science fiction, extravaganza; carnivally ridiculing Soviet reality and values; using techniques of grotesque, parody and irony. While analyzing underground prose texts, we spotted the hyperbole of ideologized society, when writers resorted to word creation, quotation thinking, literary allusions, when they chose a marginal narrator with his individual philosophy, the one who would be isolated from society. All these stylistic features of the prose work poetics, by the writers of the period under study, constitute a special, discrete, multi-level, multi-aspect underground writing.

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