Their Fathers' Voice

Aksyonov, Venedikt Erofeev, Limonov, and Sokolov, -children of the sixties and seventies-, were among the first to test the limits of -glasnost- in the post-Stalin period. Although their major novels suggest a shared modernist belief in the power of verbal art to provide a place or promise of truth, and, perhaps, salvation, they set out first to recapture, for their abused native tongue, its ability to -mean-. They called into question the literary conventions concerning logicality, coherence, and propriety. Through their own -aberrant discourse- they sought to -mean- anew. Long in need of thorough explication, their works constitute the missing link between the -alternative prose- writers of the nineties and Russia's pre-Soviet literary heritage."