Аннотация
This paper is focused on the works of the lesser known Russian avant-guard writer Pavel Ulitin (1918-1986) – perhaps the most radical author of Russian prose of the second half of the 20th century. Ulitin’s hand-made books could be described as collages of photographs, records of Moscow intellectuals’ conversations, autobiographical reflections, and prose poetry; moreover, he included passages in English, German, and French in his texts and used different pseudonyms. His ‘style of hidden plot’ can be found in the experiments of German Dadaism and ‘cut-up technique’ elaborated by William S. Burroughs and Bryon Gysin in the late 50s in Paris. However, Ulitin invented his aesthetic method several years before Burroughs and Gysin, and strived to represent the experience of the Gulag and the failure of utopian projects of the 20th century. He considered any consistent historical and biographical narrative as a form of oblivion of unique personal existence. Thus he seems to be one of the early postmodernists in the European literatures and a predecessor of the experiments of autobiographical writing.