Iurii Buida's Prusskaia Nevesta (1998)

This book is a unique exploration of postmodernist allegorical structures in Russian author Iurii Buida's short story collection 'Prusskaia Nevesta', a work largely acknowledged by post-Soviet academia but never critically examined until now. Through Buida's unreliable authorial lens, Prusskaia Nevesta tackles the implications of post-Soviet Russian identity formation and legacy through a highly unique and uneasy conflagration of two literary genres, the allegorical and the magical realist. In combining the two, McLeod posits that Buida undermines both genres to offer the critical reader a paralogical understanding of knowledge, wherein knowledge itself can only be accessed in the revelation or articulation of the unknown. Ultimately, Buida's text reengages a longstanding philosophical dialectic by inscribing itself not only into the Russian but also into the European literary heritage, moving between both to critically posit them against each other and prove the anachronism of such binary structures of reasoning in the post-Soviet world.