La violazione della norma nella struttura sintattico-interpuntiva di Asan di Vladimir Makanin

This work investigates the violation of linguistic and literary norms in Vladimir Makanin’s novel Asan. The award of the first prize to the novel at the Bolshaia Kniga 2008 literary competition provoked considerable controversy. If some critics valued the sober, fragmented and scarcely elaborated style, others denied the work’s literary merit, even when praising the author’s choice to focus on such a difficult and sensitive issue as the Chechen war. This study aims to describe and discuss some of the main characte- ristics of the novel’s style and textual architecture. The focus will be on three features that emerged particularly frequently: syntactic fragmentation, non-integrated nominal sentences and the use of coordinating conjunctions as discourse-structuring devices.