| Sumario: | This paper looks at the cyberpunk fiction authored by Tatyana Tolstaya, Victor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin, in order to delineate their literary and political engagements in imagining the future, in a world where Russia plays a lead, if controversial, role. From the literary point of view, their prose ranges from postmodernism to metamodernism, with Pelevin closer to the former, and Sorokin, to the latter of the two poles. Their aesthetic choices should be correlated with their public postures (involving biographical trajectories, artistic creeds, ethical statements, political choices, and so on). Postmodern tropes like unreliable narration, irony, and self-referentiality can be connected to political relativism, whataboutism, and solipsism, while the metamodern emphasis on the affective turn resonates with a mutant form of moral responsibility, in a postapocalyptic ecosystem.
|
|---|