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DOI 10.52172/2587-6945_2022_19_1_201

Abstract

Topoi of happiness are the object of artistic play in the works of famous Russian postmodern writers Ven. Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, T. Tolstoy, V. Pelevin, M. Elizarov. Even at the most superficial glance, the felicitous areas of their texts reveal specific features that are polemical in relation to traditional interpretations. The purpose of the article is to analyze, on the basis of postmodernist prose, how the discourse of happiness topoi is transformed under the influence of demythologization and deconstruction. The article deals with the spiritualized, correlating with folk ideas about the ideal semantics of Petushkov's space in Ven. Erofeev’s poem "Moscow-Petushki", a microcosm of the dacha, in which the characters feel their unity with nature and beauty, in Sasha Sokolov's novel "School for Fools", a model of a harmonic garden-paradise in T. Tolstoy's collection "They Sat on the Golden Porch". At the same time, it is noted that the short-lived idyll, identified with the Divine principle, even in early postmodern texts ends with the expulsion of heroes into the world of deceit and lack of will, in which the hell of alienation becomes the norm of existence. The article considers the deformation of topoi of happiness in the texts of the representatives of the so-called. "melancholic" postmodernism - V. Pelevin and M. Elizarov, who are convinced of the unattainability of harmony in the real world engulfed by chaos. It is emphasized that paradoxical, relativistic interpretations of felicitous topoi predominate in mature postmodernism. They are the sets of artificial structures that exist in the minds of characters that do not distinguish between the real and the virtual. It is concluded that the nostalgic mode in modeling the topos of happiness has changed to an ironic one, emphasizing the possibility of achieving happiness in an infinite number of parallel worlds.

Keywords

Postmodernism, deconstruction, happiness, Ven. Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, T. Tolstaya, V. Pelevin, M. Elizarov.