Evgenij Vodolazkin’s novel “Aviator” as a postmodern text

Abstract

Evgenij Vodolazkin’s novel “Aviator” is a great opportunity to analyze text from the standpoint of not only traditional literary point, but also cultural anthropology and cultural sociology. In the situation of postmodern so called cultural structures acquire a relatively autonomous existence in their own power of discourse, sometimes beyond the control of their creators.

Interest in the structure and the system is replaced by interest in processuality and discursively in a situation of uncertainty. As a result, in the cultural space of Postmodern, continuity and discontinuity are combined in a peculiar way, which causes voids and gaps of communicative action. So the old principles of attitude to the literary text and its analysis are revised, which led to the “anthropological turn” and the separation of the anthropology of literature as an opportunity to understand the relationship between the real and the imaginary in all its versions.

The author’s problem in this case can be articulated as an attempt to combine old humanistic values with ethics variability in the situation of multiple identity. At the same time, the author's deconstruction is subjected not only to the artistic text created by him, but also to the author’s own strategies

This is how an ambivalent and uncertain area is created, in which the author is both a writer, art critic and literary critic, while reducing the distance between himself and the characters. The author leaves the zone of classical Art Nouveau for the zone of Postmodern as  the garden of branching paths, dominated by Representation, Experience and Desire. And due to the destruction of the distance between the narrator and the characters the author begins a fruitful author’s self- and psychoanalysis.