Conceptualization of historical narrative in modern Russian prose

Abstract

The article examines the conceptualization features of historical narrative in modern Russian literature and identifies the main lines of the historicism concept transformation in Russian literature at the turn of the 20^th–21^st centuries and in the latest literature. At the same time, the article identifies a significant difference between both the substantive foundations of the past reflections and the forms of its artistic conceptualization. The interest in deconstructing metahistorical discourse, which dominated historiographical prose at the turn of the century, is currently being replaced by the interest in the problem of historical memory, which acts as a form of the traumatic Soviet experience representation, perceived as a variant of cultural trauma at the present stage. The article highlights the main strategies for the representation of historical memory: the strategy of post-memory, the strategy of discursive production of the past, and the strategy of reflective nostalgia. The strategy of post-memory turns out to be the most in demand, declaring itself both in feminist prose and in the literature of the grand canon. In general, the texts under consideration demonstrate the interaction of various practices of commemoration. In novels that implement the strategy of post-memory, the appropriation of family history results in unblocking memory and elaborating the traumatic experience of the Soviet Union, which forms the basis for completing the identification processes of the narrator. In the novels that carry out the discursive production of the past, or rather in the novel by G. Yakhina, the formation of a variant of postcolonial memory reveals itself.