Metamodernism as an interpretive context for character poetics in A. Salnikov’s novel “The Petrovs in and Around the Flu”

The research aims to identify the interpretive productivity of metamodernism as a context that explains the specific character poetics in Alexey Salnikov’s novel “The Petrovs in and Around the Flu”. The article employs metamodernism as an explanatory framework to describe the character as a vehicle for sense-making that unfolds in an oscillatory mode between post-ironic distance and the need for affect, care, and “new sincerity”. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the bodily-affective organization of the protagonists (illness, pain, physiological reactions, “lapses” in speech) is conceptualized not as thematic decoration, but as a key to the metamodernist “structure of feeling” within the text, which establishes an ethics of readerly participation. The study finds that character poetics forms a metamodernist mode of sense-making in the novel: while irony is maintained as a form of self-defense, it yields to empathy and an “as if” belief in the significance of everyday connections in situations of vulnerability. Character contradictions are interpreted not as disintegration, but as a dynamic through which the text reconstructs meaning following the postmodern experience of distrust.