ABSTRACT
Valeriia Spartakovna Narbikova's relatively small and recent literary output has been accompanied by a markedly diverse critical response. This reception has been staggered by a typically complicated and delayed chronology of publication, but increasingly Narbikova's name is mentioned in lists of significant figures in post-Soviet fiction. Her first published work, Balancing the Light of Daytime and Nighttime Stars attracted a largely polarized critical evaluation that has continued with each of her following works. Strikingly, all Narbikova's readers seem able to agree on is her maverick status in the early post-Soviet literary environment. For a writer so determined to point up the arbitrary nature of forms of classification the absurdity of this situation may seem perfectly fitting. Narbikova's writings are dominated by the concept of dialectic, of which mayhem or disintegration is only one side of a movement which is answered by, and which strives towards, comprehensive perfection, towards what is in fact a prelapsarian state of unity.
