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Abstract: The article explores the concept “author’s myth” and pays special attention to the determination of the role of myth in literature. Myths are used in the structure of artistic works of different genre forms and trends of both domestic and foreign authors within the framework of postmodernism in order to connect the artistic world or a particular work of art with the world literary tradition. The interpretation of the myth differs depending on the author’s position. The object of the study includes the specificity of the author’s myth implementation in a postmodern work, which will be considered on the example of V. Pelevin’s and B. Akunin’s prose. The article uses the methods of qualitative content-analysis and the narrative method; the methods of idealization and deduction are also employed as supplementary ones. On the basis of concrete examples taken from the V. Pelevin’s and B. Akunin’s novels, the authors formulate the characteristics of the postmodern myth: thus, the author’s myth in postmodernism is a narrative, and the connection between the elements of the narrative is not always obvious to readers, since it largely depends on the author’s perception. It is paradoxical that the figure of the author as the original creator is insignificant: the author in postmodernism is a retelling figure of already existing stories, but they are free to endow them with their own connotation, include mythologemes and ideologemes in a different context, and also freely work with the original composition. The main function of the myth is to reflect a certain image of reality, being a superstructure above it, containing certain semantic models and roles distributed among the characters, as well as expressing the author’s position. The author’s myth can be described as a playful, mosaic, inverse construct. The results of the article can be used in further analysis of V. Pelevin’s and B. Akunin’s works, as well as when working with the concept of “author’s myth” and studying the transformation of myth (both archaic and social, cultural, etc.) in the postmodernist literature.

About the author(s) :

Artem B. Borunov

National University of Science and Technology MISIS (Moscow, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2507-7218

Ekaterina V. Sherchalova

The Institute of International Law and Economics named after A. S. Griboedov (Moscow, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7190-1151

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 05.08.2021; date of publication: 29.10.2021.

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