The statement about the deep and historically formed literary-centricity of the Russian public consciousness today hardly needs proof. Since the time of Metropolitan Hilarion, " Tales of Bygone Years "and" Words about Igor's Regiment " and until very recently, it is the art of the artistic word, fine literature that has been at the center of not only culture, but also statehood. Literature for many centuries has been the defining principle, the ubiquitous life-giving solution that binds and organizes people's life and consciousness. The writer always played a special role in the life of Russia, occupied a special position, which Pushkin drew attention to in the words of his hero Charsky: "Our poets do not enjoy the patronage of gentlemen; our poets are gentlemen themselves... Our poets do not go on foot from house to house, asking for help" (Egyptian nights // Pushkin A. S. Sobr. soch. v 10 tt. M., 1981. Vol. 5. p. 241).

This does not mean that the high status of a writer has always remained unchanged in our country. Of course, there were times and even epochs when its prestige declined, and yet literature, up to the late Soviet period, occupied a central position in the hierarchy of spiritual values.

The implementation of the principle of literary centrism would hardly be possible without the special role of the Russian language in this process. Our language has undergone a number of significant changes over the past ten or fifteen years-

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similar changes. It is most important for us to pay attention to the processes that took place in the language of works of fiction.

The language of fiction is largely a reflection of live colloquial speech: it is difficult to create a work that enjoys the reader's interest without referring to the means and material of the very speech that is common among the people at this stage of life. Nevertheless, what happened in the sphere of literary language has its own specifics.

In the early 90 - ies of the XX century, along with the breaking of Soviet ideological stereotypes, an attempt was made to dismantle the existing literary structure. Under the guise of rejecting the method of "socialist realism", which, by the way, never became a guiding principle and dogma for our writers, there was a distancing from the classical tradition, and above all from the values formed by Russian literature of the XIX century.

The main direction in literature was chosen postmodernism. Its representatives are based, schematically speaking, on two basic principles:: a) the use of other works, their text fragments, samples, stylistics and details as source material in literary work; b) ironic or cynical reinterpretation of the cultural heritage of previous eras. Creative activity of such authors as Vic. Erofeev, Dm. Prigov, Vl. Sorokin, V. Pelevin, B. Akunin, etc. received a resonance in publishing circles, found a response from a significant part of readers, and was awarded a number of prestigious awards. The works of postmodernists were most popular among foreign researchers of Russian literature. According to the witty remark of the critic N. Ivanova, " postmodernists fertilized the dissertations of all Western Slavists."

Specific creativity of representatives of postmodernism received a large critical and literary press. The evaluation of their activities from a literary point of view is not included in the scope of our tasks today. Regarding the work on the language, we can say the following. Since for postmodernism the most important concept is the so-called "metatext", "hypertext", "supertext", that is, a certain timeless and extra-national universe, and they inevitably relate their writings to it, then willy-nilly we have to state that the language of modern society appears for them as something secondary, imperfect, unprocessed and extremely amorphous. This is rather a semi-finished product, which has no independent significance and should be subjected to massive processing-vivisection. And if so, then there is no need to talk about careful, respectful, and delicate use of it.

The named literators have different approaches to the impact on

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language. One completely builds his poetics on the newspaper-poster or everyday-mundane poetics of social art, the other enthusiastically turns to the layer of vulgar profanity, the third tries to expand the range of decency accepted in society, introducing extremely naturalistic, disgusting and obscene motives into prose, the fourth confronts religious exercises that are far away in mood and vocabulary., philosophical and political matters, the fifth-refers to the heritage of past centuries and directly uses the aesthetic findings of other writers... You can name many other approaches. Perhaps they have one thing in common: the absence of any reverence, reverence for the Russian language, the desire to preserve the best in it and clean it of the unworthy. Slang formations, Anglo - Americanisms, artificially constructed lexemes and interjections are used (and most often without the slightest artistic or semantic motivation). I do not undertake to evaluate this type of activity from a moral point of view, but I repeat: at a certain stage, literary products of this kind found their readers and in a certain way affected the Russian language.

However, it would be illogical and unnatural if modern literature did not find some opposition to this trend. As one of the factors that resist the onslaught of postmodernism, I would mention the emergence in modern Russian literature of such a curious artistic trend as"new realism". For the first time, this term (in a new meaning) was used in March 1997, when Moscow writers, mainly of the middle and young generation, gathered for a conference under this motto. As one of the initiators of this event, I can confirm that at first there was no talk of any new direction. Prose writers, poets, critics, publishers, literary critics, and journalists simply met to discuss the situation with realism in modern literature. But in an unexpected way, it turned out that even those authors who continue to work in line with the realistic tradition now write somewhat differently than before. Our lives have changed too much recently for the writer to react in any way to it. My proposed thesis "New realities - new realism"was accepted as a working hypothesis, although it was not accepted by everyone and not unambiguously.

What is the difference between "new realism" and just realism in its classical sense? First of all, the classical language is not so clear either. For example, D. I. Pisarev put one meaning in it, M. Gorky - another, and now P. V. Palievsky - the third. Secondly, any formulation can be challenged from the point of view of writing practice: major artists rarely fully fit into the framework of a particular trend. Work out its definition by category-

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At the same time, it is not so easy to find a solution that would satisfy everyone. Rather, it would be fair to speak of realism as a method that is constantly being updated and modified according to historical conditions. Thus, we get the definition that new realism is realism at this stage of the development of society and the language of fiction. In the mid-thirties, by the way, when the Writers ' Union was being created, it was socialist realism that was called new realism.

Nevertheless, I would like to highlight some specific features of the new realism in terms of its relation to the linguistic element.

An important feature of works written in the spirit of new realism is a special attitude to the author's position. Very often, the writer himself is one of the heroes of the story, not much different from the others. This technique, as a rule, enhances the authenticity of the story told, gives it a confessional and truthful character, turns the story or novella into something similar to reality. The current author usually does not teach anyone, does not pour out moral invectives, he sympathizes with the characters, but stands with them as if on the same level and experiences the same difficulties as they do. In other words, the position of the new realist is to be in the thick of the people not in words, but in fact. Of course, this can only be achieved with the skillful and precise use of the language tools that are now used by the masses.

Speaking in general about the attitude of the new realists to language, it is no exaggeration to state their increased interest in the organizing function of language. Russian language for most of them is not just a tool for communication, description, and narration. In addition to meaning and artistic expressiveness, they consider the l o-bob as its sacred, ontological, life-giving essence. Language for the representative of the new realism is a sign of fate, something that is given to us both as a destiny, and as the realization of obvious and hidden opportunities, and as an irresistible force that can - depending on the situation and situation-both exalt and punish.

Perhaps one of the first people to feel the sacramental nature of the new Russian word was Pyotr Palamarchuk. After the creation of his ascetic four-volume book "Forty Sorokov", where all the churches that once existed in Moscow were described back in the Soviet years, the writer was so imbued with a sense of belonging to the historical path of the country, the people and its language that his author's manner acquired unique predicate intonations that go back to pre-revolutionary, pre-Power, pre-Iconoclastic Russia. His cycle "Moscow Tales" was striking for its boldness in trying to combine the ancient folk language ligature with the style of Remizov's and Shmelev's stylizations, as well as with the ultra-modern poetics of Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn's journalistic pressure. Then it is perceived-

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moose is considered by many as a word game, author's arbitrariness and artificiality of style. Today it becomes clear that the writer worked hard in the direction of combining the linguistic elements of different eras and levels. Perhaps this did not always work out organically, but the prose writer undoubtedly proceeded from a good motive - to restore the former beauty and imagery of the Great Russian language on a new turn.

Another attempt to expand the lexical reserves and enrich the figurative structure by referring to the storehouse of language history can be called Alexander Seguin's novel "Derzhavny", dedicated to the personality of Ivan III. It would seem that we have never had a shortage of historical writers who were not averse to flaunting an outdated phrase, a forgotten word or a dialect. But often they brought down on the readership a raw speech mass that sounded exotic, but unintelligible. As a result, the use of ancient verbal material did not have the slightest impact on the modern language, which sounds increasingly emasculated and secularized. A. Segenya's novel demonstrates a fundamentally different approach: the speech patterns of the past almost nowhere look like a decorative background, decoration, or ornamentalism - everywhere he uses the verbal riches of centuries ago in such a way that they sound natural and accurate for the modern reader, who can continue to apply them in everyday life.

Another example. In the novel "Nude Nature" by Vladislav Artemov, there is the following passage. Describing a domestic, and seemingly mundane scene - after a shopping day, a makeshift city market is being cleaned up, he unexpectedly unfolds it into a real timeless mystery: "When he got out of the subway, the market was already quiet. Vendors packed the day's unsold goods into striped bags, and homeless people on duty scooped up the remaining trash - cardboard boxes, torn newspapers, banana peels, stubs, crumpled cellophane, planks, wood chips - and burned it all right there in the middle of the square. Black, thick smoke billowed into the darkened sky. The sunset was beginning to glow... it smelled of nomadism and wild will that came from outside, from the robber steppes, where dry grass is smoking and dark wolves howl at the crimson moon...". The connection of times, which can manifest itself at any point of existence, is generally characteristic of the style of new realism.

But it also happens that the writer turns to a rare, rare word to achieve a satirical or comic effect. In the collection "Game without deception", compiled from the stories of new realists, there is a prose miniature by N. Ilyin "Hipicus". The whole plot outline, and the main author's task is kept in it on this single word, placed in the title. What is it?

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Let's hear how the main character of the story, a newly-born nobleman, defines it, of which we now have a great many out of nowhere: "You've never heard such hiccups, Nikolai, have you?.. So that's it, " the guest announced happily, hiccupping horribly. "That's because you haven't heard such hiccups, because you're not from the upper class. You think I'm just having hiccups. And this is not a hiccup. This is hipicus, so in English our disease is called...". It took only one word for the writer to impressively describe the personality, ambitions and, so to speak, the moral image of a character who does not look very much like a full-fledged person, and not like a nobleman - so, some kind of hipicus.

Dramatic is the story of "Toad Summer" (A. Segen), which features a crazy riot policeman who participated in the shooting of the White House in October 1993. Every year in the fall, it experiences an aggravation: a commie is eager to shoot, strangle barkashats, and cut khasbulatovites. By chance, he comes across a man who has an exotic hobby-breeding tropical fish in an aquarium, in professional terms-ichthyodorite. And this word, placed as if across the text, across the story, across the narrative, repeatedly reinforces the tragic absurdity of the events that took place, the catastrophic break in the psyche of people who were forced to kill their compatriots. The extremely peaceful environment into which the frenzied guardian of the presidential power bursts is emphasized verbally: "mother-of-pearl tetraodons", "loricarias", "Gabonese catfish".

Oleg Borushko's "Hospitable Vano", Alexey Varlamov's "Partizan Marych and the Great Steppe", Vladimir Galkin's "The Gardener from Kuntsevo", Nikolai Iovlev's "The Koran and the Charter", Marina Kretova's "Separation", Vladimir Krupin's" Yankee, Go Home!", different in tone and style, bring to the fore It turns out that the problem of contact between the Russian language and foreign influences: the eternal confrontation between the West and the East, Europe and Asia, Russian and non-Russian principles is largely interpreted by them as a language problem.

But, perhaps, none of the representatives of the new realism of the language sphere is not endowed with such powers as that of Mikhail Popov. Many of his novels are based on the functioning of oral and written forms of speech, and this is done with a wide variety of approaches. One of the most important native speakers of the language is, of course, the world of literature.

In general, the tools, technical means, and arsenal of techniques used by new realists is strikingly wide. It is possible to note cases when they entered the field of their opponents and achieved success, resorting to the aesthetic principles of postmodernism. M. Popov's novel "It's time to go to Sarajevo" is written, in fact, entirely

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based on the material of Russian classical and even Soviet literature. A huge number of reminiscences and literary and cinematic analogies are present in the novel by Yuri Polyakov "I conceived an escape".

What is the difference between new realism and postmodernism, if they have the right to use someone else's tools? And there is a very definite, fundamental difference. And it consists in the attitude to life, including language. If the postmodern dislikes reality, secretly (or even openly) despises and fears it, then the representative of the new realism-worships reality, is inspired by it and respects it in all its manifestations, including, of course, in the sphere of language functioning.

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