Deconstruction of ‘national metanarratives’ in Russian Postmodernism

Abstract. The article deals with the problem of adequate perception of Russian postmodernism. Why do the Western readers have better comprehension of Russian postmodernists’ works than the Russian ones? Negative attitude of the Russian audience towards postmodernism is largely due to the peculiarities of its mentality associated with the "national metanarratives." Writers and artists are performing metanarratives’ deconstruction in order to overcome the binary structure of the Russian culture. They reveal our traditional "eternal" questions through unconventional means, resorting to obscene language and shocking naturalistic and physiological descriptions. This way they show that a writer does not have to pretend to be a prophet or a converter of human nature and soul. They defend freedom of creative self-expression, insisting on the perception of the artistic text as self-contained, not aimed at substituting a real life.