Non-fiction or autofiction? On one trend in Russian story of the turn of the 21st century

The article reviews the trend in modern prose, called autofiction, which resembles in its form a documentary-autobiographical narrative of non-fiction, but differs from it in artistic approach, with the author’s attention being transferred from the figure of the autobiographical hero-narrator to the figure of a biographical author who unfolds narrative. That’s why in autofiction prose you can observe the equality of the author, narrator and character. On the material of short stories of the late 1990s and early 2000s, it is shown how, thanks to his space-time freedom, such a hero can be on the border between the reality of living people and the world of the dead. In the stories “Vision” by V. Rasputin and “Three Travels. The possibility of a menippea” by L. Petrushevskaya realistic motivations are weakened, since the situation of a “non-industrial” hero who finds himself in a different dimension is not always translated into the language of traditional art. But, first of all, it is connected with the strengthening of the “creative chronotope” (Bakhtin). The process of creating a fictitious reality takes place in the mind of an outstanding person, possessing a creative gift and therefore capable of penetrating into other worlds.