This review examines studies from 2010 to 2020 on Mikhail Shishkin (b. 1961), a Russian writer living in Switzerland, who writes in Russian and German. In articles by Russian and foreign philologists Shishkin’s poetics is presented as the quintessence of the modernist myth on a writer who escapes from reality and history into language. This fact explains his interest in the inexhaustible resource of the world and Russian literature, thanks to which his texts become palimpsests or centos – a space for genre and style dialogue, a place where the cultural tradition is restored and at the same time renewed.
Mikhail Shishkin; contemporary Russian literature; modernism; postmodernism; metafiction.