The Boilerplate World

From the Editors: Concluding our Section Four: Fundamental Lexicon of Power, we offer a contribution that bridges the divide between analysis and creative writing. It employs a technique called skaz, a kind of (apparently) improvisational stylization, close to oral speech, that ‘inadvertently’ reveals the speaker’s personality. Tracing its roots back to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, the technique is often used to take linguistic or social liberties outside the realm of normative speech. Fair warning: the reader will find such liberties here in the narrator’s stream of consciousness, verging at times on stereotyping of women, sexual violence, members of the LGBT community, and citizens of Rwanda. The narrator discusses the state of Russia's commercial cinema.