ИСТИНА

The analysis of postmodernism, which presents to be a structurally similar cultural phenomenon of the 2nd half of the XX century, seems to be enriched by following the implementation of postmodern poetics in the works of writers of different traditions – in this case of such representative avant-garde Chinese and Russian authors as Yu Hua and Vladimir Sorokin. The works of V. Sorokin and Yu Hua show obvious thematic, stylistic and methodological correspondences converging to the key elements of postmodern poetics and representing aspects of the principle of non-realism. There is a vivid controversy with realism in its "classical" form and the form of social realism, as well as a struggle with the "literacentrism", an amalgamation of the elements of "pure" literature and mass culture, the introduction of "forbidden" phenomena (obscene language, explicit sex scenes, etc.). We also find in Yu Hua and V. Sorokin the use of representational violence, i.e. radical critique of language and the deconstruction of reality, whereby the writers create a grandiose picture of the absurdity of human existence. The exploitation of aesthetic complexes of the absurd and the grotesque allows to construct an alternate reality, dismantling the traditional images of history. In the criticism of the dominant discourse there is outlined a confrontation with modernist values of the intelligentsia, which in China have been supplemented with Confucian moral evaluative approach. In Yu Hua this can be seen as an involvement of a strong tradition of vernacular literature with its widely represented "somatic dimension", the resurrection of the elements of the carnival. Through the destruction of automatism of perception and the implementation of the aesthetics of ugliness there takes shape a movement from the principle of travesty to the true sublime.