I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

books, dystopia, problem of memory, Russian literature, “Kys”, “Metro”

The article considers the book as an important image for dystopia, its leading functions in the novels of this genre and their transformation. The dystopia genre is popularized at the end of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st century, rethinks the modern problems of humankind and shows them to the reader in unreal (or relatively real) time and space with a proportion of hyperbolization. The issues of decreasing interest in reading, the position of the book in society and the preservation of memory and history resonate in the works. The book is the custodian of collective and individual memory, which is revealed as one of the paramount problems of dystopias the inhabitants of which exist in the world of cultural trauma. The research material is Russian literary dystopias of the 21^st century: the novel “Kys” by T. Tolstaya and the trilogy “Metro” by D. Glukhovsky. To determine the functions of the book in the works of the genre, the author uses the methods of description, comparison, and intertextual analysis. Thus, the article proves that the book in dystopian novels partially loses its original function of storing and transmitting memory to descendants, often becomes a taboo sphere of culture, can carry physical or mental danger, and also act as a weapon and a tool to control the human mind. Such a transformation is due to the loss of people’s connection with historical and cultural memory, as well as fundamental changes in collective memory, which occurs after the catastrophe that marked the beginning of one or another dystopian fictional world.

Реутова Майя Анатольевна – аспирант кафедры истории русской литературы Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9012-6031, maija14@mail.ru