Sergej Lebeděv a promýšlení ruských devadesátek

Sergej Lebedev (1981) is one of the most translated and highly appreciated contemporary Russian authors of fiction. In his books, Lebedev repeatedly attempts to grasp the meaning of the Soviet past for today’s Russia. His novel The People of August (Ljudi avgusta, 2016) addresses the issue of the 1990s. It is set in the geographical space of the post-socialist countries. The protagonist travels across Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Kazakhstan in search of victims of the Stalinist terror. The present article discusses Lebedev’s approach to the 1990s in comparison with novels that reflect the same period as their immediate present. In different national and cultural contexts, among the novels that have constructed literary models of the post-socialist world, the ones that stand out include Peter Pišťanek’s Rivers of Babylon (1991), Jáchym Topol’s City Sister Silver (Sestra, 1994) and Viktor Pelevin’s Generation “P” (1999). These are novels generally labelled as postmodernist. They portray the 1990s societies as a battlefield of different tribes fighting with each other for resources and power. While Lebedev’s novel presents the same type of general picture of the 1990s, its protagonist is driven by a higher purpose. He is trying to uncover the truth about the traumatic past and to understand how the past affects the present and the future. In my paper I therefore propose to label Lebedev’s writing as metamodernist, as it revitalizes historicity, affect and depth.