The Trickster as a Hero of the Frontier, or On Survival Mechanisms in Chaos

Abstract

Purpose. The article explores the image of a trickster, and the peculiarity of its embodiment in world literature. Special attention is paid to the peculiarities of assignment and functioning of the trickster image in modern Russian literature: from camp prose with its interest in the “naked man”, and the weirdos of traditionalism, to the characters created in the postmodern era. Results. The author analyses the reasons for and prospects of the emergence of the trickster hero, his ability to solve tragic problems facing its consciousness at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The author emphasizes the life-affirming and vital potential of the image, the possibilities inherent in it, the means of understanding and representing tragedy. The author analyses the change of the trickster's paradigm from one epoch and text to another, and presents the peculiarities of every cultural period. The author analyses the features of the modernist trickster, which becomes the initiator of events and the engine of the plot, and the concept of the postmodernist trickster, which differs significantly from his predecessors. The analysis of artistic texts shows that the trickster is used frequently due to its ambivalence and liminality, which meets the needs of the “crisis time”. Conclusion. The relevance of the figure of trickster is related, in particular, to the obvious fatigue of modern man from the “secondary” playful strategy of postmodernism, when the suspicion of irony is total, and to the enormous pressure that man feels and the trickster can alleviate.