Poetics of the Absurd in Foreign and Kazakhstani Literature of the 20th and 19th Centuries

Botagoz S. Baizhigit, Ж.Б. Мыханова, М.Е. Minaidarova

2025

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DOI 10.47526/2025-4/2664-0686.272
Data confidence 70 medium
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Abstract

This article discusses the theory of the poetics of the absurd. It examines the theoretical problem of absurd literature and explores the poetics of the absurd in foreign and Kazakhstani literature from the 20th to the 19th centuries. The absurd is analyzed within a psychoanalytic context, and a distinction is made between the concepts of the absurd and the meaningless. Related concepts such as absurdity, nonsense, and illogicality are also considered. The categories of tragic and comic are studied as well. The methods of hermeneutic, immanent, and comparative analysis are employed. The article analyzes and systematizes the works of modern Russian-language writers from Kazakhstan, including A. Zhaksylykov, E. Ayla, N. Sakavov, A. Kim, N. Verevochkin, I. Odegov, as well as Kazakh immigrants I. Lipkovich, S. Lipovetsky, and I. Mandel. It also examines the works of representatives of Russian postmodern prose, such as V. Sorokin, V. Makanin, and L. Petrushevskaya. The study examines both the individual and general characteristics of the prose of these writers. It identifies several typological signs of creating an absurd text in the speech of characters, including a dominant associative principle, authorized syntax and punctuation, enjambment, catachresis, grotesque, antinomy, auto-fiction, irony and self-irony, and the resistance against classical and Soviet traditions at both the content and formal levels, often reaching the point of parody and caricature. The study also explores the dissimilarity of poetic form, such as an attraction to free verse, experiments with poetic form, paradox, alogisms, the reverse side of everyday consciousness, externally unmotivated structural metamorphoses, the principle of chance, and the fight against automaticity of perception, among others.