Концепция «массового общества» в русской и белорусской русскоязычной прозе последней трети ХХ – начала XXI в.

Abstract

For a long period the author's attention is focused on one of the most relevant socio-philosophical theories of the XX century – the concept of “mass society”. The article examines the philosophical and literary origins of this concept and the peculiarities of its refraction in the Russian and Belarusian Russian-language literature in the last part of the XX and beginning of the XXI century. Philosophers and writers are particularly interested in the problem of the increasing influence of the “mass society” trends on a particular person and the world as a whole. Three leading writers – Vl. Makanin, A. Korolev and A. Andreev in their texts explore the life of a man who was influenced by the “mass society” philosophy, research modern social trends and individual transformations due to the socio-political restructuring of the Russianspeaking world under the influence of programs and standards of consumer society. A. Korolev and V. Makanin propose as the dominant the concept of the heroinhabitant, “medium / small”, mass man, considering it from a philosophical point of view – the ideas of existentialism; all characters who stand out from the mass find themselves in the position of a minority. The dominant of A. Andreev's artistic world is a representative of the elite, the “smart man” or “new superfluous man”, genetically ascending to the classical literary type of “superfluous man”; the opposite type of character is drawn more widely, but much more critically and rigidly in comparison to Russian writers.