ABSTRACT
Already in the first responses to the fiction of the "New Wave" (which appeared in the early years of Gorbachev's perestroika), critics noted that the author himselfbecomes the central character. Peter Vail and Alexander Genis observed that this fiction is characterized by "the insistence on the authenticity of the author-hero. From the author's point of view, no one is more authentic than the author himself. That is, the writer. Thus here we have an artistic, rather than social designation: The main character is the writer" (1989: 248). They explained this dislocation of the "axiological center" as "skepticism toward the importance of the social ideal," a special kind of escapism into the realm of art. Vladimir Potapov agrees, emphasizing that this "other fiction" (the term suggested by Sergei Chuprinin and immediately picked up by many, if not by all) is a type of"literature that is conscious of itself only as a phenomenon of language," where "the 'I' or 'ego' [of the author] is placed at the center of the perception of the world in order not to lose oneself completely, not to lose one's 'living soul,' not to become a toy for the will of another, for words, evaluations, judgments" (Potapov 1989: 252, 254).
