This work has been given the title "The Search for Female Identity" because its core question is: what constitutes female self-identification? This search is carried out by searching literary traces, since self-identification can be deconstructed by analyzing the texts. Texts by an Austrian and a Soviet-Russian writer were chosen as the basis for this deconstruction. In a comparison of their two writings, the difference between the two socio-political systems in terms of their possible influence on self-identification could also be crystallized. The theories used (mainly poststructuralist) together with the interpretations help to extract the pre-discursive nature of the texts and to decipher the image of femininity. The analysis carried out showed that in both societies this picture is full of myths, however, they were developed and implemented differently. In the course of this development the individualistic Western culture encounters the limits of its individuality, which also affects women and influences their unity in themselves. Meanwhile, the post-Soviet society striving for all-round collectivism fails to control the construction of identity, since it does not offer enough playground for self-determination and overwhelms especially women with the imposed standards. Key words: female...

La présente étude revient sur le concept de théâtralité souvent employé à propos du Satyricon pour tenter d’enpréciser les manifestations et les modalités. Car derrière l’apparente simplicité du terme et la banalisation de sonemploi à propos de cette oeuvre, se cache une pluralité de procédés. La théâtralité du Satyricon revêt trois formes.Elle se définit spontanément comme la réutilisation de codes propres aux genres dramatiques comiques auxquelsPétrone emprunte situations, thématiques et procédés linguistiques. Cette théâtralité première est complexifiéepar son ancrage dans un univers narratif orienté, dont les préoccupations recoupent celles du genre satirique. Lerecours à des éléments théâtraux dessine les contours d’une société excessive et inauthentique, et se voit doncfiltrée par le topos du monde décadent : cette théâtralité seconde devient le moyen d’exprimer l’outrance desindividus et de leurs comportements. Et c’est précisément parce que dans le monde du Satyricon les valeurstraditionnelles sont caduques que la littérature classique est obsolète. S’ouvre alors la voie à une théâtralitétroisième, intrinsèquement liée à la parodie. Elle est principalement portée par la voix du narrateur, chez qui lapratique excessive de la déclamation a entraîné une projection systématique dans un au-Delà fictionnel. Lafracture existant désormais entre la réalité et sa perception a une double conséquence : d’une part toutes lessituations du quotidien s’assimilent à des représentations de scènes littéraires de référence ; d’autre part elledéconstruit la littérature traditionnelle en en exhibant les clichés. Cette théâtralité permet à Pétrone de renouvelerla littérature et de jeter les bases du genre romanesque. / The present study reexamines on the concept of theatricality often used about the Satyrica to try to specifyappearances and methods. For behind the visible simplicity of the term and the everyday acceptance of its use inrelation to this work, there hides a plurality of processes. The theatricality of the Satyrica takes on three forms. Itdefines itself spontaneously as the re-Use of codes particular to the funny dramatic genres from which Petroniusborrows situations, themes and linguistic processes. This first theatricality is complicated by its anchoring in adirected narrative universe, whose concerns it shares with those of the satiric genre. The falling back on theatricalelements outlines an excessive and inauthentic society, and thus sees itself filtered by the decadent world topos.And it is exactly because in the world of the Satyrica the traditional values are null and void that classicalliterature is obsolete. The way is then opens to the third theatricality, intrinsically connected to parody. It ismainly carried by the voice of the narrator, to whom the excessive practice of declamation entailed a systematicprojection to a fictional otherworld. The fracture existing from now on between reality and its perception has adouble consequence: on the one hand all the situations of everyday life can be reduced to representations ofliterary reference scenes ; on the other hand it deconstructs the traditional literature through clichés. Thistheatricality allows Petronius to renew literature and to lay the foundations for the novelistic genre.

The present work analyses the fiction of the post-Soviet Russian writers, Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Tuchkov and Aleksandr Khurgin against the background of the notion of post-Soviet Russian postmodernism. In doing so, it investigates the usefulness and accuracy of this very notion, proposing that of ‘post-Soviet neo-modernism’ instead. Common critical approaches to post-Soviet Russian literature as being postmodern are questioned through an examination of the concept of postmodernism in its interrelated historical, social, and philosophical dimensions, and of its utility and adequacy in the Russian cultural context. In addition, it is proposed that the humorous and grotesque nature of certain post-Soviet works can be viewed as a creatively critical engagement with both the past, i.e. Soviet ideology, and the present, the socially tumultuous post-Soviet years. Russian modernism, while sharing typologically and literary-historically a number of key characteristics with Western modernism, was particularly motivated by a turning to the cultural repository of Russia’s past, and a metaphysical yearning for universal meaning transcending the perceived fragmentation of the tangible modern world. Continuing the older Russian tradition of resisting rationalism, and impressed by the sense of realist aesthetics failing the writer in the task of representing a world that eluded rational comprehension, modernists tended to subordinate artistic concerns to their esoteric convictions. Without appreciation of this spiritual dimension, semantic intention in Russian modernist fiction may escape a reader used to the conventions of realist fiction. It is suggested that contemporary Russian fiction as embodied in certain works by Sorokin, Tuchkov and Khurgin, while stylistically exhibiting a number of features commonly regarded as postmodern, such as parody, pastiche, playfulness, carnivalisation, the grotesque, intertextuality and self-consciousness, seems to resume modernism’s tendency to seek meaning and value for human existence in the transcendent realm, as well as in the cultural, in particular literary, treasures of the past. The closeness of such segments of post-Soviet fiction and modernism in this regard is, it is argued, ultimately contrary to the spirit of postmodernism and its relativistic and particularistic worldview. Hence the suggested conceptualisation of post-Soviet Russian fiction as ‘neo-modernist’.