Variants of metaprose

Abstract

The article is concerned with the Russian prose that emerged in the years before the perestroika, in the 1970s — 1980s, and specifically, with authors who showed a clear tendency towards the techniques and structures typical of metafiction: A. Bitov, V. Makanin, A. and B. Strugatsky, and others. According to the author, it is their books that demonstrate a consistent and deliberate employment of metafictional techniques and constructs, where the metafictional nature is manifested as the use of methods that accentuate and simultaneously disrupt the boundary between fiction and real life, as well as the text and an extratextual reality (structures like ‘a story within a story,’ conversations between the author and a character, and the effect that the writing is taking on the author’s life, etc.). Said devices suggest to the reader a possibility of parity between reality and the worlds created by an artistic imagination. Through his analysis of the defining features of the late Soviet metafiction, M. Amusin discovers that the aforementioned writers experimented with metaprose in particular to reach new creative heights, i. e., a more nuanced, genuine and conscious type of prose.