ABSTRACT
Exaggeration, excess, and surplus are generally regarded as characteristic of the grotesque. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, a basic feature of the authentic grotesque is ambivalence, which expresses the two-sided fullness of life, embracing negation and destruction (the death of the old) as an essential component inseparable from affmnation (the birth of the new). What constitutes the grotesque is metaphorically summed up in two passages from Liudmila Petrushevskaia's story "Poetry in Life": "Help me, girl, my mother had an operation today for breast cancer, take a walk with me" (Devushka, pomogite rnne, moei mame segodnia sdelali operatsiiu rak grudi, poguliaite so rnnoi).l The next thing we know, that very mother after the operation and the same girl are spending the night in the same room: "Bed to bed, one could say, that stubborn battle of two loving hearts was taking place" (26). Death and copulation, the end of one life and the beginning of another, fear and laughter all coexist in the grotesque.
