The image of a trickster in grotesque realism and traditionalism: converegence and divergence (on the material of V.P. Aksenov’s trilogy “The Moscow saga” and V.G. Rasputin’s short story cycle about Senya Pozdnyakov)

Statement of the problem. The figure of a trickster comes to the fore during periods of fundamental changes in society: the era of the 1990s gives various embodiments of this archetype in literary texts. The purpose of the article is to analyze the forms of realization of this type within the framework of the “polar” trends of Russian literature of the early 1990s - grotesque realism and traditionalism. The research material included texts of V.P. Aksenov and V.G. Rasputin. Review of the scientific literature on the problem. The works of P. Radin, K.G. Jung, and K. Kerenyi are devoted to the cultural understanding of the trickster archetype. The key literary studies in this area belong to V.N. Toporov, L. Abramyan, M.N. Lipovetsky, and N.V. Kovtun. Methodology. The structural and typological method, the method of descriptive poetics, and mythopoetic analysis are used. The results of the study. The paper analyzes the types of tricksters in traditionalist prose (Senya Pozdnyakov) and grotesque realism (Vasily Stalin), the choice is due, on the one hand, to the “polarity” of artistic methods, on the other hand, to the time of creation of works (the early 1990s). Vitality, mediation potential, liminality, ambivalence, connection with the sacred context allow us to correlate the image of Vasily with the Trickster paradigm. The ability to communicate negatively, overidentification with Soviet discourse and its simultaneous profanation indicate an extra-moral position of the character, his actions are jokes, tricks, his role is that of a dodger, a cheat. Despite the formal similarity, the trickster of traditionalist prose Senya Pozdnyakov, who is more associated with national culture, is forced to play a different role: in the post-perestroika ‘foreign space’, only he remains alive and has the potential of an actor, but attempts to confront the world of chaos are unsuccessful. This is clearly seen in the episodes related to the motif of snake fighting and constructed in such diverse texts according to the same scheme.