Reflection of identity crisis in the late Soviet literature

The article reviews a literature trend of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s which was characterized by searching the answers on questions: "who am I?" and "why do I exist?". Marking self-identification as a vital need, the writers at the same time were anxious about refused self-identification in modern society. In the books by Yury Trifonov, Andrei Bitov, Vladimir Makanin, Valentin Rasputin and other authors of the late Soviet times, a hero's refusal from self-identification demonstrated his identity crisis as he couldn't stand the test of individual experience and was dissolved into collective "us". And this, according to Erich Fromm, is a false self-identification. The same trend can be traced in the national literature, mostly in poetry, where a metaphor of self-identification problem is a drama of a lyric hero, who is searching for a life content meaning and for his own "himself". In the "Sutra of Moments" by Bair Dugarov and his diary of 1982 on its basis the poet shows the time when an artist's reaction could feel a threatening identity crisis as a general spiritual crisis of man and society. Ability to self-analysis, self-realizing in time and space, self-comprehension in the national fate allow us to include the Buryat poet's diary prose into the literature context of the late Soviet period, and also to find a way out of personality crisis.