Soviet production novel in the system of canons of social realism and soc art (“Marina’s Thirtieth Love” by V. Sorokin)

The aim of the study is to identify the features of the genre-structural and poetological constructions in Vladimir Sorokin’s conceptualist novel “Marina’s Thirtieth Love” (1984). The paper traces the connection between the genre features of the “Soviet novel” and the tradition of socialist realism literature and its deconstructions in the practice of conceptual art in the 1970s-1980s. The study examines not only the formal features of Sorokin’s conceptual novel, but also their content-related and semantic layers, which open up new perspectives of perception not only of the semantic component, but also of the form (genre) of the conceptual text. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the fact that for the first time the genre of the work becomes the central object of research; Sorokin’s conceptual novel is considered in comparison with the genre of the production novel. The result of the research is the analytical identification of the target settings of the conceptual novelist V. Sorokin on overcoming the principles and techniques of Soviet socialist-realist art and the establishment by the avant-garde writer of discreditable perspectives of perception of social and ideologically stable “concepts” that developed in the post-October period and traditionally formed the genres of Soviet art. The ways of interaction and mutual influence of pictorial conceptual practices with the experience of literary creativity and ways of transferring visual techniques of conceptualists to the field of verbal art are traced. It is demonstrated which Soviet precedent texts, images, motifs, personalities (including M. Tsvetaeva and A. Solzhenitsyn) became the object for Sorokin’s novel deconstruction, became the “foundation stone” for his conceptualist experiment. It is found that the imitation base in Sorokin’s “Marina’s Thirtieth Love” was the so-called “production novel”, a thematic subvariety of socialist realism prose, subjected to Sorokin’s ironic apologetics and simultaneous debunking.