Russian Postmodernist Literature. Analysis of the four most common aesthetic codes (PDF)

Academic Paper from the year 2021 in the subject Russian / Slavic Languages, grade: A+, , language: English, abstract: This paper focuses exclusively on Postmodernism literature and analyze the 4 most common aesthetic codes. Postmodernism dismissed the central idea of modernist and avant-garde trends, which is the mythologization of existence and reality. These trends tended to create utopian or idealistic paradigms of life that transcended all forms of primitive negativity, such as violence, inhumanity, poverty, and depression.

Postmodernism holds the idea that myths are just mere creations (created by certain people) that have no basis in reality, and that these myths are often used as a form of brainwashing or social coercion, which force the masses to believe in a single form of reality and way of existing.

Postmodernism originally was a critique against Socialist Realism (the Communist myth), and now focuses on questioning and deconstructing all contemporary concepts, such as intelligence, beauty and happiness. However, Postmodernism is by no means an attempt to say that nothing in life is "real", rather, it holds an ambivalent view towards all ideas and points of view, deconstructing them, and then reconstructing them and amalgamating them into one big, playful whole.

Thus, Postmodernism holds that all ideas have potential but refuses to side with any particular idea. It seeks to form a compromise that meets somewhere in the middle between 2 extreme polar ideas, whereas previous modernist trends believed that polar opposites were incompatible.