Abisheva O.K. Professor of Russian Russian Philology and World Literature Department gave a lecture on "What you can read, forgetting about time, business, and worries (Modern Russian literature)"at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University on February 25, 2021.

Undergraduates, PhD doctoral students, colleagues from different departments of the university learned how to distinguish kitsch literature from real literature, mass culture products from noteworthy works in the modern world, where they constantly have to choose from a variety of proposals. The texts of the grassroots culture are built according to pre-set rules. Mass literature as a whole is not characterized by problematic, complex, conflicting personality structure. It tends to stereotypes, helps to get away from the mundane, and arises as a need for entertainment.

The conversation was about authors whose works arouse the interest of critics, about whom discerning readers talk and argue. Special attention was paid to the texts of V. Makanin, E. Vodolazkin, Z. Prilepin, O. Ermakov, D. Galkovsky, S. Alexievich, L. Petrushevskaya, L. Ulitskaya, N. Sadur, Marina Paley, Olga Slavnikova, I. Polyanskaya, Svetlana Vasilenko, Marina Vishnevetskaya, and Marina Stepnova. Many of these authors have won prestigious Russian and foreign awards "Big Book", "Yasnaya Polyana", "National Bestseller", and «Russian Booker". The lecturer spoke about the philosophical and spiritual component of the iconic works of our time, associative connections in them, narrative strategies, meta-plots of the current literary process.