Conceptualization of Trickster in the Modern Literary Process

Abstract

The article observes the monograph of N. Kovtun “Trickster as a hero of our time. On the Material of Russian Prose of the Second Half of the 20th – 21st Century”, where the attributive signs of the trickster archetype (ambivalence, vitality, the role of a mediator, liminarity, creativity, connection with the sacral) are summarized and supplemented. Each of these characteristics is convincingly substantiated on the basis of other researchers’ works. The conceptual and semantic field of tricksterism is revealed with the help of the analysis of the main motives – the path, insecurity, duality, resourcefulness, moral ambivalence, high adaptability.

The relevance of this type and its signs as a hero of time is substantiated by both aesthetic and socio-historical grounds. Modern man is under enormous pressure, therefore the researcher indicates the crisis of the main literary trends, and concludes that the vital potential of the image of a modern rogue is the most viable.

The author has analyzed a large amount of empirical material of the 20th – 21st centuries considering characters with signs of a trickster in the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shukshin, V. Makanin, M. Tarkovsky, O. Bitov, L. Ulitskaya, T. Tolstoy. The present stage indicates the trend of trickster depersonalization. As the rhetorical figure has acquired an independent communicative subjectivity, the question about the trickster's depersonalization and transformation into the category of a concept hero arises.