"Пацанские рассказы" Захара Прилепина. Новый автор, новый герой

Zakhar Prilepin is a 34-year-old writer, critic, social and political activist with a remarkable wartime experience, essay writer and TV presenter, who is highly popular and prospers very well in the media zone. Apart from three successful novels The Pathologies (2005), Sankya (2006) and Sin (2007), he also published a collection of stories which are subject of analysis in the present article. Boots Full of Hot Vodka. Boy Stories (2008) is a collection of stories full of brutality, humour, and lyricism, from which a delightfully coherent image of the protagonist and the world emerges. The coherence results for instance from the closeness of the protagonist and the author. The latter says of himself: “I am a happy man who occasionally keeps himself busy writing books.” Prilepin seems to be creating a new topos, absent from Russian literature so far — the topos of a happy man.