Summary “Pjetsuh New Moscow Philosophy”


The most complete aesthetics of the “ironic avant-garde” was expressed in V. Pietsukh’s story “The New Moscow Philosophy”. The presentation is conducted on behalf of the narrator, a person who is well-rounded, unhurried. He reflects on the relationship between life and literature, the importance of literature in the life of a Russian person. His reasoning is a tuning for perception of that paradoxical reality that is constructed in accordance with the literary canons, the reality that develops within the framework of the plot of Crime and Punishment. This reality is ordinary and absurd. “Most likely, literature is, so to speak, the root of life, and even life itself, but only slightly shifted horizontally, and therefore there is absolutely nothing surprising in the fact that we have a lot of life, there is literacy, but, on the other hand, where literature,

The plot of the story unfolds in 1988 in a communal apartment of twelve rooms in Moscow.

It is built around the death of the old Pumpyanskaya, the former owner of the whole house, who later occupied a small dark little room. Who will get this little room, and decide heroes “in a democratic way in conditions of glasnost,” as the graphomaniac informer says.

In the story are constant parody analogies with “Crime and Punishment” F. Dostoyevsky. And it is not a novel that is parodied, but life appears as a parody, as a reduced, anatomical variant of a literary work.

Reminiscences, impregnated with irony, become one of the techniques in the story of V. Pitsukha. The image of the old woman-usurer re-clicks with the image of the neat old woman Alexandra Sergeevna Pumpyanskaya. In the text of the “New Moscow Philosophy” there are scenes of scenes (a wake arranged by Katerina Ivna), a commemoration of Pumpyanskaya), a comparison of the heroes of V. Pietzza with the heroes of F. Dostoyevsky (Porfiry Petrovich, Marmeladov). Even the character Petr Petrovich Luzhin appears. V. Pytsukh, speaking about the “literary” reality, always looks back at “real” literature, he even quotes Dostoevsky in the wake-up scene, speaking of the St. Petersburg and Moscow variants of the same story.


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Summary “Pjetsuh New Moscow Philosophy”