A memorable time : the prose of Vladimir Makanin, 1987-1995.

Spanning over three decades, the prose of Vladimir Makanin bears witness to the
extraordinary changes SovietlRussian society and literature have undergone, and to
which he, as a writer, has been continually exposed.
The focus of the thesis is Makanin's abiding concern with the condition of man; man
as individual and man as a collective term. The position of man in time
(contemporaneity), out of time (the eternal memory of man), and through time (the
past, present and future). Despite this apparent central concern, the author's prose is
constantly changing, and what seemed previously to be absolutes are subverted. In
this unstable environment the author continually expresses the reality in which he
perceives man to be, until the concepts of 'reality' and the nature of 'man' are
themselves destabilised.
Chapter 1 provides an introductory overview of Makanin' s literary career and critical
reception. The five core chapters examine different presentations of man's condition.
Chapter 2 discusses the tension of the individual amongst the collective, with
particular emphasis on the spatial representation of this dilemma. The third chapter is
an examination of the incorporation of parables, myths and legends, revealing attempts
to depict a 'higher reality' and also the author's means of overcoming socialist
realism's censorship constraints. In Chapter 4, the author's concept of 'genetic
memory' is considered as a temporal and spatial construct for examining man's
individuality and condition in contemporary society. This chapter additionally
highlights the author's move from his early social realist depictions revealed in the first
two chapters, to his later interest in Russian postmodern theories found in the
following two chapters. In Chapters 5 and 6 Makanin's ideas on narrative, history,
and man's postmodern condition are analysed. The final text to be discussed,
Kavkazskii plennyi, is examined as an innovation in Makanin's philosophy and
postmodem prose.