The new insincerity: about the work of Zakhar Prilepin

Abstract

In the work, a comprehensive study of Z. Prilepin’s creativity is carried out. On the one hand, the dynamics of the author’s poetics can be traced from the early works of the noughties (“Sankya” and “Sin”) to the latest texts — “Some will not go to hell” and “Militia romance”. On the other hand, Prilepin’s work fits into the general literary context of the noughties, and comparing the basic characteristics of Prilepin’s text with such trends of Russian literature as “trench prose”, “new realism” and “new sincerity” allows us to conclude about the typological similarity of Prilepin’s work and D. Prigov’s “new sincerity”. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the leading author’s strategies aimed at establishing contact with the reader and identifying communicative methods of influencing the reader, designed to create a sense of the author’s “sincerity” in the latter, whereas in fact we are not talking about sincerity as a depth of affect, but about “new sincerity” as a special kind of cultural construct.