Poetic style of the absurd shown in the short stories by Tatyana Tolstaya

The paper examined the specifics of a poetic style of « short story prose» proper for one of the best contemporary Russian novelists Tatiana Tolstaya. One should consider the creative pieces by Tatiana Tolstaya in the framework of the concepts generated by the Postmodernism. In the books written by Postmodernists who had proclaimed new values of art and aesthetics, the world represents a mess and absurdity, although every writer put his/her meaning to the notion of “absurdity”. Absurdity for Tatiana Tolstaya means discord between “dream and reality” taken for an antithesis. Petty-minded individuals perceive dreams as absurdity, that is why the «absurd» characters described by Tatiana Tolstaya are incapable to discover their calling and lost in the world where everything looks reasonable and correct, but no place is given to fairy-tales and fantasy/ imagination.