VLADIMIR SOROKIN AND RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE

This article discusses the relationship of Vladimir Sorokin’s literary work with the ideological and aesthetic attitudes of the Russian avant-garde. According to the author, to create a picture of the world Sorokin alternately refers to the methods of artistic research, characteristic of different generations of Russian avant–garde – cubofuturists, oberiuts and conceptualists – with a common focus on the fundamental problems of life, first of all – on the relationship between nature and culture as the basis of the world order. However, the natural life that takes place outside the framework of cultural conventions in the texts of Sorokin loses its appeal, is endowed with features of chaotic, low-lying physiological reality. In the modern understanding of the writer, all the «wild» that only is in man, being uncontrolled, was the «animal» in the worst sense of the word and manifests itself in appalling scenes of murder, cannibalism, coprophagia, etc. Therefore, the triumph of nature in the image of this author gives rise to a bloody nightmare or – if there is a cancellation of cultural conventions and the rivalry of nature and culture comes to naught – leads to entropy, the extinction of the energy of being. The balance of nature and culture, according to Sorokin, is possible, but gives a temporary and unreliable result. Demonstrating one or the other possibilities of interaction of the beginnings of life, Sorokin follows the ways of his predecessors – the avant-garde. The obvious goal of the author is to prevent re-appeal to the ideas that once led to a deadlock Russian culture and Russian society. The article analyzes the early stories of Vladimir Sorokin, novels «Norma», «Day of Oprichnik», «Manaraga» and other texts of the writer.