Modern Russian writers and their works. Russian prose at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries: textbook Russian prose of the 21st century

At the request of Afisha, Anton Dolin examined what the books of the author of the novel “11/22/63”, the king of horror, the most important fiction writer and the most filmed modern writer in the world, consist of.

Photo: SHOSHANNAH WHITE/PHOTO S.A./CORBIS

Car accident

Many of Stephen King's characters died in accidents, and on June 19, 1999, this almost happened to him: the 51-year-old writer was hit by a car while walking. In addition to a broken femur and multiple fractures of his right leg, he received injuries to his head and right lung. He spent almost a month on an artificial respiration apparatus; his leg was not amputated only by a miracle, but for another year the writer could not sit - and, accordingly, work. However, he gradually returned to his previous activities, reflecting the experience gained over and over again in new books, in particular, in “The History of Lizzie” and “Duma-Key”, and in the seventh volume of “The Dark Tower” they appeared sacred numbers 19 and 99. Some saw in what happened a warning from above (the writer flirted too much with the forces of darkness in his books), others - a sign of almost God’s chosenness of the writer, who managed to be reborn as a new person. One way or another, King is someone to whom these things happen for a reason. It’s not for nothing that he wrote so much about disasters and cars with mysterious powers, from “Christina” (1983) to “Almost Like a Buick” (2002).


Bachman

Stephen King came up with Richard Bachman in 1977, when he had already made his mark with Carrie. Why the pseudonym was needed is now not very clear. Either at the beginning of a career to cope with the supposed frustrations of the failure of books signed with one’s own name, or to check whether it will be possible to shoot a second time. One way or another, Bachman survived successfully for seven whole years until King killed him, by which time the hoax had already been exposed, and the cause of death in the press release was listed as “alias cancer.” If we talk about style, then Bachman, unlike the moderate optimist King, looked at the world gloomily, and the punishment of heroes for
karmic sins interested him much more than exquisite
psychologism - and in general it was more about the state of society and less about the otherworldly. The first published under this name was the novel “Fury” about an armed schoolboy who took his class hostage - however, criticism of society there backfired, and later it was not society that was blamed for each such tragedy, but “Fury” itself. The best that appeared under Bachman’s signature was the dystopia “The Running Man,” later turned into a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the creepy gothic novel “The Thin Man.” In general, Bachman's stories were noticeably inferior to those that King signed with his own name. In 1996, Bachman briefly resurrected to take part in an unusual experiment: he “created” the novel “The Regulators” with King, who wrote another weighty tome, “Hopeless,” about exactly the same fictional events. The “regulators” were clearly weaker and secondary. Bachman's final fiasco was cemented by another posthumous opus - Blaze (2007), one of the most inconspicuous in the careers of both writers.

Baseball

King is in many ways a typical American. And that's why he's an avid baseball fan. The team he supports is the Boston Red Sox, and they are mentioned throughout most of his novels and short stories. The most passionate declaration of love for baseball was the novel “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” (1999), divided not into chapters, but into innings: its nine-year-old heroine Trisha got lost in the forest, in which her only friend and assistant was an imaginary black baseball player . In 2007, the book “Fan” was published, entirely dedicated to one season of the Boston Red Sox. King - for the first time in his life - co-created it with writer Stuart O'Nan. And between these two texts, King managed to appear in the Farrelly brothers’ comedy “Baseball Fever” (2005) - in the role of finally not a fan, but a player.

Castle Rock

Founded in 1877, the town in Maine, 79 miles from King's hometown of Bangor, is actually fictional. Today it’s hard to believe: hundreds of the writer’s heroes lived and died there, and then director Rob Reiner named his company Castle Rock Entertainment in his honor. Castle Rock was first mentioned in the story “Night Shift”; every second King text refers to it or its natives in one way or another, and detailed geography, toponymy and social portrait of the city can be extracted from “The Dead Zone”, “Cujo” and “The Dark Half” " In the epic "Needful Things," Satan himself comes to Castle Rock and the town is destroyed forever. An incomparable singer of secluded “little America,” King invented a dozen tiny, colorful towns, most of which are located in Maine. The most famous after Castle Rock is Derry, haunted by the ancient curse, where the actions of It, Insomnia and 11/22/63 take place, but there are others: Haven (Tommyknockers), Chester's Mill ( Under the Dome"), Chamberlain ("Carrie") or Ludlow ("Pet Sematary"). The writer himself admits that he was inspired by Lovecraft's fictional cities - Innsmouth, Dunwich, Arkham and Kingsport.

Criticism and theory

King is famous not only for his prose, poetry and drama, but also for his theoretical works, in which he examines the legacy of the classics, analyzes cinema and offers recipes for creative success. His debut in this area was “Dance of Death” (1981), a book about the horror genre. Partly autobiographical, it offers an interesting typology of nightmares in both books and cinema, from Creature from the Black Lagoon to The Shining. In 2000, a new work, “How to Write Books,” was published, which became a bestseller around the world: its second part, “Advice for Beginning Authors,” was especially popular. In particular, he strongly recommends reading and writing four to six hours a day and reports that he has set a quota for himself - no less than two thousand words per day. In addition, every year King delights his readers with lists - sometimes controversial, but always interesting - of the best books and films of the past year. For example, in 2013, he put Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son at the top of his top ten, adding to it Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, both Hilary Mantel's Booker novels - Wolf Hall and Bring in the Bodies, as well as The Random vacancy" by Joanne Rowling. She, according to King, is one of the most significant writers of recent decades: he even wrote her a special petition between the publication of the sixth and seventh volumes of the epic about the boy wizard calling for Harry Potter to be left alive.


Lovecraft

The founder of modern American horror - and a lifelong role model for King, despite all the differences in style, character and biography. The son of a crazy traveling salesman, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a child prodigy, a visionary and a misanthrope. The heir of Edgar Allan Poe, in his masterpiece stories and short stories - “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Ridges of Madness”, “Dagon” and others - he explored the nightmares hidden behind the facade Everyday life carefree inhabitants of the twentieth century. An almost complete lack of a sense of humor, psychological accuracy and imagination in plotting (all these qualities are inherent in King) - Lovecraft was a master in the difficult task of creating unknown worlds. King, who discovered the abyss of Jungian imagery in Lovecraft's novels, read it at the age of twelve - according to the writer himself, at the ideal age for such literature.

Magic

Ancient Indian witchcraft in “Pet Sematary”, alien infection in “The Tommyknockers”, their bizarre combination in “It”, traditional magic of vampires in “The Lot” and werewolves in “The Werewolf Cycle”, the magic of time itself in “The Langoliers”. Surprisingly, magic is still absent in many books - including the most magical ones (Cujo, Misery, Dolores Claiborne, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil). Others deal with phenomena that many consider natural, albeit inexplicable: “Carrie,” “Dead Zone,” “Ignite with a Look.” However, in the broadest sense of the word, King - and his reader too - believes that the universe around us is imbued with magic, both light and dark. The ability to see, recognize and, let’s say, use it is both a gift and a curse, from which many heroes of King’s books suffer greatly. According to King, through every drunk who decides to hit his unfortunate wife, a cruel school teacher and the bully in the world manifests itself as evil, and through every attentive, restless, subtle person - perhaps a child or a short-sighted wise guy from the library - on the contrary, good. Their conflict (especially clearly conveyed in the early apocalyptic epic, which is called “Confrontation”) is endless. Classic example- the journey of an agent of good, the shooter Roland, to the Dark Tower, occupied by the same dark forces.

Dead men

Talking to the dead - in a dream or in reality - is a common thing for the heroes of King's books; sometimes, however, as in the novella "Will", they are all dead from the very beginning. But there are also special texts that are entirely devoted to relationships with those who have passed away. This is the story “Sometimes They Come Back,” which deserved a very expressive film adaptation, the story “The Body” about four teenagers who found a corpse in the forest (as King himself recalled, such a story actually happened to him - only it was the corpse of a dog, not a person) . After all, who knows whether King would have picked up a ballpoint pen if it weren’t for the death of his friend, who was hit by a train in front of Stephen’s eyes when he was only four years old. Of course, Pet Sematary, perhaps the writer’s most terrible and hopeless novel, is related to the same theme. The moral that is easy to take away from the book is quite simple: you will never be able to get rid of longing for departed loved ones - unless you resort to the help of Indian demons, which may not be the best idea. So let the dead remain in their graves. This thesis is confirmed by the later novel “Mobile Phone” - King’s variation on the theme of the zombie apocalypse.

Writers

Favorite Stephen King characters. Sometimes they are just storytellers reminiscing about their childhood (“Body”), or even non-professionals keeping a diary (“Duma-Key”), more often they are people who make a living by writing. In Misery (1987), sentimental bestselling author Paul Sheldon gets into a car accident and ends up in the hands of a professional nurse who, a crazy fan of his books, discovers the manuscript of the latest novel in her favorite series in her idol's briefcase. In The Dark Half (1989), Ted Beaumont tries to break away from his pseudonym, George Stark, a work of unbridled fantasy that has taken on a life of its own. In Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990), Morton Rainey is accused of plagiarism. In Bag of Bones (1998), Mike Noonan loses his inspiration and ends up in a haunted house. And these are just a few of the numerous writers, graphomaniacs or geniuses, alter egos of varying degrees of accuracy, confirming the hackneyed thesis: every truly talented writer always writes about himself.

Shine

A special psychic talent, invisible to others, but noticeable to those who have a similar gift. In the novel “The Shining” (1980), one of King’s seminal books, five-year-old Danny is told about him by the black giant Dick Halloran. To one degree or another, the characters in most of the writer’s novels “shine,” from Carrie moving objects to Charlie’s igniting gaze, from the mind-reading and future-foreseeing Johnny Smith from “The Dead Zone” to the seven outcast teenagers from “It,” who are able to see what is hidden underground evil and those who challenge it. As a rule, the “shining” one is fragile and vulnerable, and therefore the sympathies of the author and the reader are on his side. However, as Doctor Sleep shows, the gift of the “shining ones” can be used in other ways, for example, as food for energy vampires. A kind of absolute “shine” is John Coffey from The Green Mile.


Tabitha

Stephen King's wife, to whom many of his books are dedicated (and there is a special thanks to her in almost every one). They met at university in 1966 and married five years later, today they have three children and four grandchildren. It was she who found the Carrie manuscript in the trash bin, thrown there by King, and insisted that her husband finish the novel and send it to the publishing house. Since then, Tabitha has been the first reader of all King's texts. She has also been writing herself since the early 1980s. None of the eight novels became bestsellers, but almost all received excellent reviews.

Horror

Tradition suggests that Stephen King is considered the king of horror: the surname is conducive, and the writer himself does not mind. But being an unsurpassed virtuoso of scary literature, even unlike the most noble representatives of the genre - from Poe to Lovecraft - King never tries to scare his readers. Moreover, his books often have a psychotherapeutic effect, explaining and analyzing the nature of common phobias and helping to get rid of them. Like a true American, King cannot live without catharsis and the final victory over evil, which marks the vast majority of his novels. There are, however, notable exceptions to this rule (and most are signed with the surname Bachman).

Dark tower

Stephen King's magnum opus currently consists of eight novels written between 1982 and 2012 (the cycle also includes a multi-volume comic book epic and several short stories). Sources of inspiration include Thomas Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" and Robert Browning's "Childe Roland Came to the Dark Tower", as well as the screen image of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz". Shooter Roland Deschain, a knight errant from a post-apocalyptic future, in the company of several companions - our contemporaries, inhabitants of twentieth-century America - walks through the Wasteland to the center of the worlds, captured by the forces of Darkness, the Dark Tower. King's series freely mixes fantasy, science fiction, western, horror and fairy tales. Some consider The Dark Tower his masterpiece, others -
the most monumental failure. One way or another, difficult to organize
The mythology of the series directly and indirectly influenced everything King wrote from the mid-1980s to the present day. For example, the children from “It” resort to the help of the ray guardian - the Turtle, in “Insomnia” the demonic Scarlet King appears, and in “Hearts in Atlantis” the central character tries to hide from his servants. And in retrospect, this rule works no worse: in the fifth book of “The Dark Tower” Father Callahan from “The Lot” is included, in the fourth the heroes find themselves in the world described in “Confrontation”. Simply put, the Dark Tower is the center of the entire Stephen King universe.

Film adaptations

More than a hundred films have been made based on King's works - he is one of the most filmed writers in the world, largely thanks to the step taken at the very beginning of his career: any film school graduate can make a film based on any of his stories (but not novels) for a symbolic one dollar. It is impossible to discern a single trend behind the history of its film adaptations. But perhaps it’s worth highlighting from the general series the expressive “Carrie” by Brian De Palma (the debut novel was the first to be filmed), the hated by the author, but the great “The Shining” by Stanley Kubrick, the peculiar “Dead Zone” by David Cronenberg and the chilling “Apt Pupil” by Brian Singer is a film that stubbornly refuses to lose its relevance. At the same time, two other directors are legitimately recognized as the best screenwriters of King’s texts - Rob Reiner (“Stand By Me,” “Misery”) and Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile,” “The Mist” and several short films): neat and diligent authors, they manage to convey to the viewer the drive of the primary sources without spilling. There are a number of films based on King, and those for which he himself wrote the script right away, not based on any book. Among these are the series “Royal Hospital”, created jointly with Lars von Trier, the mystical “Red Rose Mansion” and scary tale Storm of the Century is probably the best of the three.


» Jonathan Franzen, author of "Corrections" and "Freedom" - family sagas that became events in world literature. For this occasion, book critic Lisa Birger compiled brief educational program according to the main prose writers of recent years - from Tartt and Franzen to Houellebecq and Eggers - who wrote the most important books of the 21st century and deserve the right to be called new classics.

Lisa Birger

Donna Tartt

One novel every ten years - such is the productivity of the American novelist Donna Tartt. So her three novels are " Secret history" in 1992, "Little Friend" in 2002 and "The Goldfinch" in 2013 - this is a whole bibliography, at most a dozen articles in newspapers and magazines will be added to it. And this is important: Tartt is not just one of the leading authors since The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize and blew off the top of the world's best-seller lists. She is also a novelist with exceptional fidelity to the classical form.

Beginning with his first novel, The Secret History, about a group of classical studies students who became overly interested in literary games, Tartt drags the unwieldy genre of the long novel into the modern light. But the present here is reflected not in details, but in ideas - for us, today's people, it is no longer so important to know the name of the killer or even to reward the innocent and punish the guilty. We just want to open our mouths and watch the gears turn in amazement.

What to read first

After the success of The Goldfinch, its heroic translator Anastasia Zavozova re-translated Donna Tartt’s second novel, Little Friend, into Russian. New translation, freed from the mistakes of the past, finally does justice to this mesmerizing novel, whose protagonist goes too far while investigating the murder of her little brother - it is both a scary tale of Southern secrets and a harbinger of the future boom of the young adult genre.

Donna Tart"Little friend",
Buy

Who is close in spirit

Donna Tartt is often lumped in with that other savior of the great American novel, Jonathan Franzen. For all their obvious differences, Franzen turns his texts into a persistent commentary on the state of modern society, and Tartt is completely indifferent to modernity - both of them feel like continuators of the classic great novel, feel the connection of centuries and build it for the reader.

Zadie Smith

An English novelist about whom there is much more buzz in the English-speaking world than in the Russian-speaking world. At the beginning of the new millennium, it was she who was considered the main hope of English literature. Like so many contemporary British writers, Smith is bicultural: her mother is Jamaican, her father is English, and the search for identity is the central theme of her first novel, White Teeth, about three generations of three British mixed families. “White Teeth” is remarkable primarily for Smith’s ability to refuse judgment, not to see tragedy in the inevitable clash of irreconcilable cultures, and at the same time her ability to sympathize with this other culture, not to despise it - although this confrontation itself becomes an inexhaustible source of her caustic wit.

In the same way, the clash between two professors in her second novel “On Beauty” turned out to be irreconcilable: one liberal, the other conservative, and both studying Rembrandt. Perhaps it is the conviction that there is something that unites us all, despite our differences, be it the paintings we love or the ground we walk on, that distinguishes Zadie Smith's novels from hundreds of similar identity seekers.

What to read first

Unfortunately, Smith’s last novel, “Northwest” (“NW”), was never translated into Russian, and it is unknown what will happen to the new book, “Swing Time,” which will be published in English in November. Meanwhile, “North-West” is perhaps the most successful and, perhaps, even the most understandable book about clashes and differences for us. At the center is the story of four friends who grew up together in the same area. But some managed to achieve money and success, while others did not. And the further they go, the greater the obstacle to their friendship that sociocultural differences become.

Zadie Smith"NW"

Who is close in spirit

Who is close in spirit

Next to Stoppard one is tempted to put some great figure of the last century like Thomas Bernhard. After all, his dramaturgy is, of course, very much connected with the twentieth century and the search for answers to the difficult questions posed by its dramatic history. In fact, Stoppard's closest relative in literature - and no less dear to us - is Julian Barnes, for whom the life of a timeless spirit is built in the same way through the connections of times. Nevertheless, the confused patter of Stoppard's characters, his love for absurdism and attention to the events and heroes of the past are reflected in modern drama, which should be sought in the plays of Maxim Kurochkin, Mikhail Ugarov, Pavel Pryazhko.

Tom Wolf

A legend of American journalism, his “Candy-colored Orange Petal Streamlined Baby,” published in 1965, is considered the beginning of the “new journalism” genre. In his first articles, Wolfe solemnly proclaimed that the right to observe and diagnose society henceforth belonged to journalists, not novelists. 20 years later, he himself wrote his first novel, “The Bonfire of Ambition,” and today 85-year-old Wolfe is still vigorous and with the same fury rushes at American society to tear it to shreds. However, in the 60s he didn’t do this, back then he was still fascinated by eccentrics going against the system - from Ken Kesey with his drug experiments to the guy who invented a giant lizard costume for himself and his motorcycle. Now Wolfe himself has turned into this anti-system hero: a Southern gentleman in a white suit and with a cane, despising everyone and everything, deliberately ignoring the Internet and voting for Bush. His main idea - everything around is so crazy and crooked that it is impossible to choose a side and take this crookedness seriously - should be close to many.

It's hard to miss Bonfire of Ambition, a great novel about 1980s New York and the clash between black and white worlds, the most decent translation of Wolfe into Russian (the work of Inna Bershtein and Vladimir Boshnyak). But you can’t call it simple reading. A reader completely new to Tom Wolfe should read “Battle for Space,” a story about the Soviet-American space race with its drama and human casualties, and his latest novel, “Voice of Blood” (2012), about life in modern Miami. Wolfe's books once sold millions of copies, but his latest novels were not as successful. And yet, for a reader unburdened by memories of Wolfe in better times, this critique of everything must make a stunning impression.

Who is close in spirit

The “New Journalism”, unfortunately, gave birth to a mouse - in the field where Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and many others once raged, only Joan Didion and the New Yorker magazine remained, which still prefers emotional stories in present tense in the first person. But the real successors of the genre were comics artists. Joe Sacco and his graphic reports (only “Palestine” has been translated into Russian so far) are the best of what literature has managed to replace free journalistic chatter.

Leonid Yuzefovich

In the minds of the mass reader, Leonid Yuzefovich remains the man who invented the genre of historical detective stories, which so consoled us in recent decades - his books about the detective Putilin came out even before Akunin’s stories about Fandorin. It is noteworthy, however, not that Yuzefovich was the first, but that, as in his other novels, the hero of the detective stories is a real person, the first head of the detective police of St. Petersburg, detective Ivan Putilin, whose stories about his famous cases (perhaps he himself written) were published at the beginning of the 20th century. Such accuracy and attentiveness to real characters - distinguishing feature books by Yuzefovich. His historical fantasies do not tolerate lies, and they do not appreciate invention. Here, starting with Yuzefovich’s first success, the novel “The Autocrat of the Desert” about Baron Ungern, published in 1993, there will always be a real hero in real circumstances, conjectured only where there are blind spots in the documents.

However, what is important for us about Leonid Yuzefovich is not so much his loyalty to history, but the idea of ​​how this history grinds absolutely all of us: whites, reds, yesterday and the day before yesterday, kings and impostors, everyone. The further into our time, the more clearly the historical course of Russia is felt as inevitable and the more popular and significant the figure of Yuzefovich, who has been talking about this for 30 years now.

What to read first

First of all, the latest novel “Winter Road” about the confrontation in Yakutia in the early 20s between the white general Anatoly Pepelyaev and the red anarchist Ivan Strode. The clash of armies does not mean a clash of characters: they are united by common courage, heroism, even humanism, and ultimately, a common destiny. And so Yuzefovich was the first who was able to write history Civil War without taking sides.

Leonid Yuzefovich"Winter road"

Who is close in spirit

The historical novel has found fertile soil in Russia today, and on it recent years ten a lot of good things have grown - from Alexey Ivanov to Evgeny Chizhov. And even though Yuzefovich turned out to be a peak that cannot be taken, he has wonderful followers: for example, Sukhbat Aflatuni(the writer Evgeniy Abdullaev is hiding under this pseudonym). His novel “The Adoration of the Magi” about several generations of the Triyarsky family is both about the complex connections between eras of Russian history and about the strange mysticism that unites all these eras.

Michael Chabon

An American writer whose name we will never learn to pronounce correctly (Shibon? Chabon?), so we will stick to the errors of the first translation. Growing up in a Jewish family, Chabon heard Yiddish from childhood and, along with what normal boys are usually fed with (comics, superheroes, adventures, if necessary), he was imbued with the sadness and doom of Jewish culture. As a result, his novels are an explosive mixture of everything we love. There is the charm of Yiddish and the historical weight of Jewish culture, but all this is combined with entertainment of the truest kind: from detective noir to escapist comics. This combination turned out to be quite revolutionary for American culture, which clearly differentiates the audience between smart people and fools. In 2001, the author received the Pulitzer Prize for his most famous novel, “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” and in 2008, the Hugo Award for “The Union of Jewish Policemen,” and since then he has somehow died down, which is a shame: it seems that Chabon’s main word in I haven’t said anything about literature yet. His next book, Moonlight, will be published in English in November, but it is less a novel than an attempt to document the biography of an entire century through the story of the writer's grandfather, told to his grandson on his deathbed.

Chabon's most deservedly famous text is “The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay,” about two Jewish cousins ​​who invented the superhero Escapist in the 1940s. An escapist is a reverse Houdini, saving not himself, but others. But miraculous salvation can only exist on paper.

Another famous text by Chabon, “The Union of Jewish Policemen,” goes even further into the genre of alternative history - here Jews speak Yiddish, live in Alaska and dream of returning to the Promised Land, which never became the state of Israel. Once upon a time, the Coens dreamed of making a film based on this novel, but for them there was probably too little irony in it - but just right for us.

Michael Chabon"The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay"

Who is close in spirit

Perhaps it is Chabon and his complex search for the right intonation to talk about escapism, roots and personal identity that we should thank for the emergence of two brilliant American novelists. This Jonathan Safran Foer with his novels “Full Illumination” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” - about a journey to Russia in the footsteps of a Jewish grandfather and about a nine-year-old boy who is looking for his father who died on September 11. AND Junot Diaz with the delightful text “The Brief Fantastic Life of Oscar Wao” about a gentle fat man who dreams of becoming a new superhero or at least a Dominican Tolkien. He will not be able to do this because of the family curse, the dictator Trujillo and bloody history Dominican Republic. Both Foer and Diaz, by the way, unlike poor Chabon, are perfectly translated into Russian - but, like him, they explore the dreams of escapism and the search for identity of not the second, but, say, the third generation of emigrants.

Michel Houellebecq

If not the main one (the French would argue), then the most famous French writer. We seem to know everything about him: he hates Islam, is not afraid of sex scenes and constantly claims the end of Europe. In fact, Houellebecq's ability to construct dystopias improves from novel to novel. It would be unfair to the author to see in his books only momentary criticism of Islam or politics or even Europe - society, according to Houellebecq, has been doomed for a long time, and the reasons for the crisis are much worse than any external threat: this is the loss of personality and the transformation of a person from a thinking reed into a set of desires and functions.

What to read first

If we assume that the person reading these lines has never discovered Houellebecq, then it’s worth starting not even with famous dystopias like “The Platform” or “Submission,” but with the novel “The Map and the Territory,” which received the Goncourt Prize in 2010, an ideal commentary on modern life, from its consumerism to its art.

Michel Houellebecq"Map and Territory"

Who is close in spirit

In the genre of dystopia, Houellebecq has wonderful comrades among, as they say, living classics - the Englishman Martin Amis(who also repeatedly spoke out against Islam, which requires a person to completely lose his personality) and Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, mixing genres to make her dystopias convincing.

A wonderful rhyme to Houellebecq can be found in the novels Dave Eggers, who led the new wave of American prose. Eggers started with huge size and ambitions with a coming-of-age novel and a manifesto for new prose, “A Heartbreaking Work of Stunning Genius,” founded several literary schools and magazines, and in Lately delights readers with biting dystopias, such as “Sphere” - a novel about an Internet corporation that has taken over the world to such an extent that its employees themselves were horrified by what they had done.

Jonathan Coe

A British writer who brilliantly continues the traditions of English satire, no one knows better than him how to tear modernity to pieces with targeted attacks. His first big success was the novel What a Scam (1994), about the dirty secrets of an English family during the time of Margaret Thatcher. With an even greater sense of painful recognition, we read the duology “The Crayfish Club” and “The Circle is Closed” about three decades of British history, from the 70s to the 90s, and how modern society became what it has become.

The Russian translation of the novel “Number 11,” a sequel to the novel “What a Scam,” which takes place in our time, will be released early next year, but for now we have something to read: Coe has a lot of novels, almost all of them have been translated into Russian. They are united by a strong plot, impeccable style and everything that is commonly called writing skill, which in the reader's language means: you grab the first page and don’t let go until the last.

What to read first

. If Coe is compared to Laurence Stern, then Coe next to him would be Jonathan Swift, even with his midgets. Among Self’s most famous books are “How the Dead Live,” about an old woman who died and ended up in a parallel London, and the novel “The Book of Dave,” which was never published in Russian, in which the diary of a London taxi driver becomes the Bible for the tribes that inhabited the Earth later. 500 years after the environmental disaster.

Antonia Byatt

A philological grande dame who received the Order of the British Empire for her novels, Antonia Byatt seemed to have always existed. In fact, the novel Possess was published only in 1990, and today it is studied in universities. Byatt's main skill is the ability to talk to everyone about everything. All plots, all themes, all eras are connected, a novel can be simultaneously romantic, love, detective, chivalric and philological, and according to Byatt, one can really study the state of minds in general - her novels in one way or another reflected every topic that has interested humanity in the last couple of hundred centuries.

In 2009, Antonia Byatt's Children's Book lost the Booker Prize to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, but this is a case where history will not remember the winners. In some ways, The Children's Book is a response to the boom in children's literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. Byatt noticed that all the children for whom these books were written either ended badly or lived unhappy lives, like Christopher Milne, who could not hear about Winnie the Pooh until the end of his days. She came up with a story about children living on a Victorian estate and surrounded by fairy tales that a writer-mother invents for them, and then bam - and the First Comes World War. But if her books were described so simply, then Byatt would not be herself - there are a thousand characters, a hundred microplots, and fairy-tale motifs are intertwined with the main ideas of the century.

Sarah Waters. Waters began with erotic Victorian novels with a lesbian slant, but eventually came to historical books about love in general - no, not romance novels, but an attempt to unravel the mystery of human relationships. Her best book for today, Night Watch showed people who found themselves under the London bombings of World War II and immediately after they lost. Otherwise, Byatt’s favorite theme of the connection between man and time is explored Kate Atkinson- the author of excellent detective stories, whose novels “Life After Life” and “Gods Among Men” try to embrace the entire British twentieth century at once.

Cover: Beowulf Sheehan/Roulette

Modern Russian writers continue to create their excellent works in the present century. They work in various genres, each of them has an individual and unique style. Some are familiar to many devoted readers from their writings. Some names are well known to everyone, as they are extremely popular and promoted. However, there are also modern Russian writers about whom you will learn for the first time. But this does not mean at all that their creations are worse. The fact is that in order to highlight true masterpieces, a certain amount of time must pass.

Modern Russian writers of the 21st century. List

Poets, playwrights, prose writers, science fiction writers, publicists, etc. continue to work fruitfully in the current century and add to the works of great Russian literature. This:

  • Alexander Bushkov.
  • Alexander Zholkovsky.
  • Alexandra Marinina.
  • Alexander Olshansky.
  • Alex Orlov.
  • Alexander Rosenbaum.
  • Alexander Rudazov.
  • Alexey Kalugin.
  • Alina Vitukhnovskaya.
  • Anna and Sergey Litvinov.
  • Anatoly Salutsky.
  • Andrey Dashkov.
  • Andrey Kivinov.
  • Andrey Plekhanov.
  • Boris Akunin.
  • Boris Karlov.
  • Boris Strugatsky.
  • Valery Ganichev.
  • Vasilina Orlova.
  • Vera Vorontsova.
  • Vera Ivanova.
  • Victor Pelevin.
  • Vladimir Vishnevsky.
  • Vladimir Voinovich.
  • Vladimir Gandelsman.
  • Vladimir Karpov.
  • Vladislav Krapivin.
  • Vyacheslav Rybakov.
  • Vladimir Sorokin.
  • Darya Dontsova.
  • Dina Rubina.
  • Dmitry Yemets.
  • Dmitry Suslin.
  • Igor Volgin.
  • Igor Guberman.
  • Igor Lapin.
  • Leonid Kaganov.
  • Leonid Kostomarov.
  • Lyubov Zakharchenko.
  • Maria Arbatova.
  • Maria Semenova.
  • Mikhail Weller.
  • Mikhail Zhvanetsky.
  • Mikhail Zadornov.
  • Mikhail Kukulevich.
  • Mikhail Makovetsky.
  • Nick Perumov.
  • Nikolai Romanetsky.
  • Nikolai Romanov.
  • Oksana Robski.
  • Oleg Mityaev.
  • Oleg Pavlov.
  • Olga Stepnova.
  • Sergei Magomet.
  • Tatiana Stepanova.
  • Tatiana Ustinova.
  • Eduard Radzinsky.
  • Eduard Uspensky.
  • Yuri Mineralov.
  • Yuna Moritz.
  • Yulia Shilova.

Writers of Moscow

Modern writers (Russian) never cease to amaze with their interesting works. Separately, we should highlight the writers of Moscow and the Moscow region who are members of various unions.

Their writings are excellent. Only a certain time must pass in order to highlight real masterpieces. After all, time is the harshest critic that cannot be bribed with anything.

Let's highlight the most popular ones.

Poets: Avelina Abareli, Pyotr Akaemov, Evgeny Antoshkin, Vladimir Boyarinov, Evgenia Bragantseva, Anatoly Vetrov, Andrey Voznesensky, Alexander Zhukov, Olga Zhuravleva, Igor Irtenev, Rimma Kazakova, Elena Kanunova, Konstantin Koledin, Evgeny Medvedev, Mikhail Mikhalkov, Grigory Osipov and a lot others.

Playwrights: Maria Arbatova, Elena Isaeva and others.

Prose writers: Eduard Alekseev, Igor Bludilin, Evgeny Buzni, Genrikh Gatsura, Andrey Dubovoy, Egor Ivanov, Eduard Klygul, Yuri Konoplyannikov, Vladimir Krupin, Irina Lobko-Lobanovskaya and others.

Satirists: Zadornov.

Modern Russian writers of Moscow and the Moscow region have created: wonderful works for children, a large number of poems, prose, fables, detective stories, science fiction, humorous stories and much more.

First among the best

Tatyana Ustinova, Daria Dontsova, Yulia Shilova are modern writers(Russians), whose works are loved and read with great pleasure.

T. Ustinova was born on April 21, 1968. He treats his tall height with humor. She said that in kindergarten she was teased as "Herculesine". There were certain difficulties in this regard at school and institute. Mom read a lot as a child, which instilled in Tatyana a love of literature. It was very difficult for her at the institute, since physics was very difficult. But I managed to finish my studies, I helped future husband. I got on television completely by accident. Got a job as a secretary. But seven months later she moved up the career ladder. Tatyana Ustinova was a translator and worked in the presidential administration Russian Federation. After the change of power, she returned to television. However, I was also fired from this job. After that, she wrote her first novel, “Personal Angel,” which was immediately published. They returned to work. Things were looking up. She gave birth to two sons.

Outstanding satirists

Everyone is very familiar with Mikhail Zhvanetsky and Mikhail Zadornov - modern Russian writers, masters of the humorous genre. Their works are very interesting and funny. Performances by comedians are always expected; tickets to their concerts are sold out immediately. Each of them has their own image. The witty Mikhail Zhvanetsky always goes on stage with a briefcase. The public loves him very much. His jokes are often quoted because they are incredibly funny. At the Arkady Raikin Theater, great success began with Zhvanetsky. Everyone said: “as Raikin said.” But their union fell apart over time. The performer and the author, the artist and the writer, had different paths. Zhvanetsky brought with him a new literary genre into society, which was at first mistaken for an ancient one. Some are surprised why “a man without a voice and acting ability goes on stage”? However, not everyone understands that in this way the writer publishes his works, and not just performs his miniatures. And in this sense, pop music as a genre has nothing to do with it. Zhvanetsky, despite the misunderstanding on the part of some people, remains a great writer of his era.

Bestsellers

Below are Russian writers. Three interesting historical adventure stories are included in Boris Akunin’s book “History Russian state. The Fiery Finger." This is an amazing book that every reader will enjoy. An exciting plot, bright heroes, incredible adventures. All this is perceived in one breath. “Love for Three Zuckerbrins” by Victor Pelevin makes you think about the world and human life. He puts at the forefront questions that concern many people who are able and eager to think and think. His interpretation of existence corresponds to the spirit of modernity. Here myth and the tricks of creatives, reality and virtuality are closely intertwined. Pavel Sanaev's book "Bury Me Behind the Plinth" was nominated for the Booker Prize. She made a real splash on the book market. This magnificent publication occupies a place of honor in modern Russian literature. This is a true masterpiece of modern prose. Easy and interesting to read. Some chapters are full of humor, while others move you to tears.

Best Novels

Modern novels by Russian writers captivate with a new and surprising plot and make you empathize with the main characters. The historical novel “Abode” by Zakhar Prilepin touches on the important and at the same time sore subject of the Solovetsky special purpose camps. In the writer’s book, that complex and heavy atmosphere is deeply felt. Whoever she didn't kill, she made stronger. The author created his novel based on archival documentation. He skillfully inserts monstrous historical facts into the artistic outline of the essay. Many works of modern Russian writers are worthy examples, excellent creations. This is the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” by Alexander Chudakov. It was recognized as the best Russian novel by the decision of the jury of the Russian Booker competition. Many readers decided that this essay was autobiographical. The thoughts and feelings of the characters are so authentic. However, this is an image of genuine Russia in a difficult period of time. The book combines humor and incredible sadness; lyrical episodes smoothly flow into epic ones.

Conclusion

Modern Russian writers of the 21st century are another page in the history of Russian literature.

Daria Dontsova, Tatyana Ustinova, Yulia Shilova, Boris Akunin, Victor Pelevin, Pavel Sanaev, Alexander Chudakov and many others won the hearts of readers throughout the country with their works. Their novels and stories have already become real bestsellers.



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