B. S. Makanin is one of the most interesting and original contemporary Russian writers. A deep, universal understanding of everything that happens in life is the nerve of his prose. Like contemporary authors L. Petrushevskaya, T. Tolstoy, V. Tokareva, V. Makanin is far from topical political passions, is not constrained by any ideological or aesthetic canons, he is intensely looking for new forms of artistic reproduction of reality, trying to overcome the dangerous alienation of a person from the surrounding world. As a writer, he is distinguished by his analytical attention to the "small", "average" person, identifying his life orientations, and searching for the moral coordinates of modern life. The attitude of a person to nature, to another person, demand from oneself, moral consistency in choosing actions, or, on the contrary, the "decline" of the human in a person, naked calculation, servility, cynicism, adaptability - these are the most common issues that unite Makanin with other bright masters of modern prose. Metaphors-symbols of the writer - "laz", "citizen running away", "man of the entourage", " how to live?", as well as Shukshinsky's question " what is happening to us?", Aitmatov's concept of "mankurt", Astafyev's "last bow", Rasputin's "threads with knots", metaphors-symbols of Leo Tolstoy. Petrushevskaya's "svoi krug" and "novye Robinsony" became the artistic code of the time. The main problem of Makanin's work is "Can we consider that a person is a creature that recreates life? Does a person change their life and themselves? Or it is a creature that is twitching back and forth in its search just because it has not fully found its biological niche" ("Laz"). The writer's credo is "it is necessary to love people with high love" ("Forerunner"). Stylistically, Makanin's prose is characterized by the strengthening of the lyrical and subjective principle, the use of those forms of artistic expressiveness where realism and conventional forms of image, the mos ... Read more