Русская литература между читателем и писателем: от соцреализма до соцарта

The reader turned to be the central figure of Russian literature of the Twentieth century, having risen from the character to the author and from the author to the author’s image. This paper focuses on the transformation of the reader into the literary character in 1920s ‘skaz’ (with an emphases on Zoshchenko and Platonov); then into the author in Socialist Realism and finally, into the image of the Author in Sots-art. If Russian literature of the Nineteenth century was a literature of writers, in the Twentieth century it became a literature of readers. As for the Twenty-first century, in a crisis situation of the reading when the connection between the reader and the author of the text was torn, there is a danger that it may be a century of literature losing its relevance