The engineeress of human souls

The work attempts a literary ‘portrait’ of the contemporary writer and scenarist A. Kozlova. The author charts the evolution of Kozlova’s work, from the early ‘ultra-shock’ stories and the novel Whazzup, Winner [Preved pobeditelyu] (2006), a transparent satire of the fat years of the 2000s, to Ryurik (2019), a novel structured as a multilevel psychological quest. In addition, the critic describes the writer’s language as sharp, full of irony and in sync with contemporary culture and the modern Russian language. The critic notes that Kozlova’s works are highly context-dependent: one book picks up where the previous one left off, and together they form a confession and a journal of personal growth and development. According to Zhuchkova, the writer’s biggest achievement is that Kozlova managed to rise above the constrictions of the 1990s’ ‘ultra-shock literature’ and harness the format of autopsychological prose, which in Russian literature originates in E. Limonov’s works, to portray a transcendent image of a positive character and a history of personal development, both of the heroine and the author herself. © 2020, A. V. Zhuchkova