Longing… In my heart, there are countless laments, If I try to speak—who is there to listen? With a painful melody, my soul burns, Enough… my beloved remains in my memory.
Calling myself the cure to my own pain, If I write strange verses in loneliness, When I try to write, words fail my sighs, Enough… my beloved remains in my memory,
From sorrow, flames spark within my heart, My starry nights turn into day, I miss you—who will feel my longing? Enough… my beloved remains in my memory…
My Beloved…
In sweet dreams, on the wings of my desires, Like the moon’s embrace, immersed in endless joys. You come shyly, with a gentle, hidden smile, My love, created only to love me.
You are the cure to my heart, my sweetest voice, Like the sun in the sky, spreading light above. You are my happiness, my soul rejoices seeing you, My love, created only to love me.
Like the fragrance of countless garden flowers, Like the pure blue of the endless sea. I loved you, my dear, just like Layli loved,
My love, created only to love me…
Love…
If only you’d listen to my heart just once, With hope it whispers, “I miss you, my love.” Still, I go on living because of you, A word that burns my soul — that word is love.
This heart longs for the day you came to me, Its cries resound, yet swallow all its pain. My yearning calls to you from far away, A word that burns my soul — that word is love.
Why do hearts never escape their sorrow? Why do these aching songs never fall silent? Even in anguish, my heart seeks only you, A word that burns my soul — that word is love.
Oh heart, it calls your name across the skies, In heavens, in the moon, perhaps in air. It searches always, even in melodies, A word that burns my soul — that word is love.
I say “love”… but what is love itself? A meeting of two gazes, or self-devotion? Yet one thing I understood when I saw you — You are my heart’s true cure… you are my love.
Yuldasheva Xadichaxon Bahodir qizi was born on January 8, 1993, in Tashkent, in a family of intellectuals. She is passionate about literature, art, and science. Several of her literary articles have been published in international journals. She is a participant in international anthologies held in countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Azerbaijan, and India, including the “New Renaissance Students’ Almanac.”
She is the district-stage winner of the “Woman of the Year 2024” competition in the nomination “Best Creative Woman of the Year.” She has also participated in the “Followers of Behbudi” competition. Currently, she is a third-year student majoring in Psychology at Tashkent University of Humanities.
Joseph C Ogbonna is a prolific poet, a former high school teacher, and an amateur historian. Some of his works have been published by Synchronized Chaos, Spillwords Press, Micromance, PoetryXhunger, Waxpoetry Magazine, Ihram, Borderless, Orenuag Journal, North of Oxford, all your poems and stories magazines.
He also has two self-published volumes to his credit. His poems ‘Napoleon to Josephine and Josephine to Napoleon,’ were aired by the BBC Radio 3 to mark the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know where the bodies are buried. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Yellow Mama, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, Night Owl Negative and Disturb the Universe Magazine. His most recent book, to live your dreams, published by Whiskey City Press, is available at Amazon.com. you can find it by clicking here: https://a.co/d/0frIpA15
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN PROSE: IN SEARCH OF A NEW HERO
Jizzakh State Pedagogical University
Faculty of Philology
Major: Russian Language and Literature, Student of Group 723-24
Kobulova Madina
Abstract: This paper examines the problem of finding a new hero in contemporary Russian prose of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The characteristic features of the central characters in works by leading authors of the period — Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Zakhar Prilepin, Viktor Pelevin, and Mikhail Shishkin — are analysed. Special attention is paid to the transformation of the hero’s image in the post-Soviet context, the loss of traditional value orientations, and the search for a new identity. The paper concludes that contemporary Russian prose reflects the spiritual and moral aspirations of society, offering a diversity of heroes, each of whom answers the question of the meaning of life in their own way.
Keywords: contemporary Russian prose, new hero, post-Soviet literature, character image, moral quest, identity, value orientations.
Main Body
Contemporary Russian prose occupies a special place in the global literary process. Shaped by the conditions of fundamental historical change — the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reassessment of national identity, and the rapid entry into an era of globalisation — it set itself fundamentally new artistic tasks. One of the most central among these was the question of the hero: who is he, the person of the new era? What values guide him? Is he capable of a genuine moral choice?
The study of this question is particularly relevant, since literature has always responded keenly to the demands of the age, offering readers models for reflection and spiritual orientation. Unlike Soviet literature, which imposed strict requirements upon the ‘positive hero’, prose of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries rejects a single canon, granting the reader the right to judge the moral standing of characters for themselves.
Among the authors who have most vividly reflected the search for a new hero are Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Zakhar Prilepin, Viktor Pelevin, and Mikhail Shishkin. Each offers their own vision of the modern person, their place in society and their inner world. The heroes of Lyudmila Ulitskaya are people immersed in the world of private life, family relationships, and moral dilemmas. In the novels The Kukotsky Enigma (2001) and Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006), the writer creates images of people seeking spiritual support amidst historical catastrophes. Her heroes are imperfect and contradictory, but it is precisely this that makes them vivid and recognisable. Ulitskaya affirms the value of ordinary human life as such, without grand declarations or ideological programmes.
Zakhar Prilepin, in his novel Sankya (2006), turns to the image of a young man seized by a thirst for action and a search for meaning in radical political protest. His hero is a product of an era of social disillusionment — stripped of former reference points and attempting to create new ones. Prilepin raises pointed questions about the relationship between the personal and the historical, and about the limits of what is permissible in the struggle for one’s convictions.
Viktor Pelevin chooses the path of postmodernist irony and mythologisation. His heroes — from Generation ‘P’ (1999) and Buddha’s Little Finger (1996) — exist in a space of simulacra, where reality is replaced by media images and advertising constructs. The search for a genuine ‘self’ becomes for them a quest through a labyrinth of illusions. Pelevin shows how consumer civilisation destroys the individual, reducing a person to a set of clichés.
Mikhail Shishkin, in his novels The Taking of Izmail (2000) and Maidenhair (2010), explores the possibilities of language as the last refuge from chaos. His heroes find themselves through the word — through the attempt to describe and thereby hold onto a reality that is slipping away. Time and memory become the key categories in his artistic world.
Thus, contemporary Russian prose does not offer a single model of the ‘new hero’, but it is precisely this diversity that constitutes its value. The heroes of Ulitskaya, Prilepin, Pelevin, and Shishkin are different answers to the same questions: who to be, how to live, what to believe in. Literature fulfils its eternal function — it helps a person to make sense of themselves and their time.
Conclusion
In the course of the study conducted, it was established that contemporary Russian prose of the late 20th and early 21st centuries actively participates in the process of forming new cultural and moral orientations. Analysis of works by L. Ulitskaya, Z. Prilepin, V. Pelevin, and M. Shishkin showed that the image of the hero in post-Soviet literature undergoes a profound transformation: the place of the monolithic ‘positive hero’ is taken by a contradictory, searching person who has frequently lost former values but has not ceased their spiritual quest.
The particular significance of contemporary prose lies in its capacity to reflect honestly, without embellishment, the reality of a transitional time. Themes of the loss of identity, existential loneliness, and the search for meaning in a world without ready-made answers prove to be close to a broad readership — primarily young people facing the same questions.
At the same time, the study showed that, for all the diversity of artistic strategies, contemporary authors remain faithful to the humanist tradition of Russian classical literature: at the centre of their attention is the person, their inner world, their capacity for compassion and moral choice. This allows us to assert that contemporary Russian prose does not break with the great literary tradition but continues it under new historical conditions.
References
Ulitskaya, L.E. The Kukotsky Enigma. — Moscow: Eksmo, 2001. — 448 p.
Prilepin, Z. Sankya. — Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2006. — 352 p.
When life confronts you, stand your ground, be strong,
For you are human—rise where you belong.
My name is Tursunova Mehrinoz Oybek qizi. I was born on February 28, 2005, in Andijan region. Currently, I am a third-year student at Andijan State Pedagogical Institute. I chose primary education because I enjoy working with children.
My favorite activities are reading books and learning languages. At the moment, I work as a Turkish language teacher. In my free time, I enjoy writing poems.
The strangest thing about Willem Dafoe’s career is not that he played Jesus Christ once. It’s that he played Jesus only once. A brief clerical malfunction in the casting universe, immediately corrected by returning him to his usual rotation of characters who look like they’ve been living on a steady diet of dust, nicotine, unresolved sexual tension and built up flatus.
Nothing from the Christ role appears to have adhered. No trace of grace. No residual compassion. Not even the faintest aftertaste of “love one another.”
When I asked him for an interview, the man who once overturned the moneychangers’ tables responded with the charm of a sun‑bleached parking citation:
“I charge.”
Three words. Dry as chalk. Delivered with the affect of someone who has spent his entire career speaking from the shadows of graffiti-scrawled industrial stairwells.
This would have been unremarkable if I hadn’t spent years in the company of people whose cultural mass makes Dafoe’s filmography look like a series of public‑service announcements about dehydration. Lemmy offered me cigarettes on his hotel bed. Katherine MacGregor, not an interview subject but a personal friend, took me to Amadeus in her Mercedes and explained the film with the precision of a woman who had outlived several artistic epochs. Caroline Munro had lunch with me in London. Gitane DeMone shared a meal; Tairrie B. Murphy gave me a squeezy hug after a long interview at a Hollywood Starbucks. Ellyn Maybe once talked with me on Zoom for nearly ten hours without implying that the meter was running. Tom Sullivan, Iris Berry, Ellyn Maybe, Pleasant Gehman, Militia Vox, Valor Kand, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Amélie Frank, John Shirley—all of them managed to speak without attaching a price tag to the act of being alive.
None of them ever said, “I charge.” They had no need to.
Dafoe’s line didn’t offend me; then again, I am neither innocent nor naive. Of course he isn’t Jesus. He’s an actor who essayed that role once. At the same time, it amplified an extraordinary reality…everything before and after fits neatly into a narrow emotional climate: dimly lit, vaguely threatening, and fundamentally transactional.
At some point, the absurdity staged itself. I imagined a biblical marketplace, the kind with dust that has given up on kinetic movement.
Dafoe‑Jesus emerges, robes hanging like fabric that has never known water, eyes carrying the same parched intensity he brings to every role that isn’t Christ. He approaches with the solemnity of a man about to deliver a parable, then leans in and mutters, “You want an interview? That’ll cost you.” Salvation as a side hustle.
He adjusts his crown of thorns with the same energy as a man straightening a hat he found in a gutter and begins explaining that miracles incur overhead, that loaves and fishes do not multiply themselves, that the Sermon on the Mount comes with a mount fee.
The disciples stand behind him like dehydrated stagehands—Peter attempting authority, Judas calculating percentages, Thomas deciding whether to doubt the whole thing or request documentation.
I mention Lemmy, Betty White, Katherine MacGregor, Caroline Munro, Gitane, Tairrie, Ellyn’s ten‑hour conversation, the thousands I’ve been paid for my work. He listens without absorbing anything, then shrugs with the resignation of someone who has never portrayed a character capable of hydration. “I’m not them,” he says. “I’m working here.”
He produces a battered invoice tablet from somewhere in his robe—an object that looks like it has survived several droughts—and begins itemizing a charge for “spiritual consultation.” After a long pause, he pockets it again and says, “Fine. This one’s on the house. Don’t tell the Pharisees.”
Then he disappears into the crowd, back into the role he never stops playing: a man who looks like he’s about to ask if you’re finished with that cigarette.
The only miracle he performed was waiving his own fee. Those two words were the only free performance I was ever going to get, and they conveyed everything necessary.
