About modern teenagers with writer Asya Volodina — RealnoeVremya.com

To explain what an MP3 player is

The main character The novel tells the story of a student who commits suicide. People around him give their own version of events, while revealing their own stories to the reader. Part of the paintingThe main character is a teacher who is surrounded by many very different teenagers. The real cicadas tells the reader the story of a lesson that ended in a shooting. Asya Volodina herself taught at the university and observed the behavior of modern teenagers for a long time.

“Zoomers are very different from the previous generation. I feel like the line was crossed in 2000. When I was teaching people who were five years younger than me, the age difference was not so big because we had a common background. When the difference is bigger, about ten years, you have to explain something. For example, what an MP3 player is and how to punch a ticket,” says Asya Volodina.

The writer often looked Class film from Estonia with his students, the film makes slight reference to the book and The real cicadas series. The film was usually discussed after watching it. Asya said that students who were five years younger than her came to the same conclusions. While those who were ten years younger asked questions that the author had never thought of. For example, why didn't the children film everything and show their parents what was happening at school?

“The fact that you can record something and you can provide objective evidence is what differentiates us. Furthermore, this recording can be used to manipulate and force someone to do something. This is precisely the subject that I address in Part of the painting“Zoomers came into a world where everyone does this. It's an organic part of their existence,” the author explained.

Bullying has become easier thanks to social media

If the generation born in the late 1980s and 1990s was created in the era of bandits and terrorist attacks, while in the world of Zoomers social networks and a manipulable digital image reign, modern teenagers can put a distance between their real self and the one they imagine shown to the world, because the world has suddenly expanded.

“Children learn very early to interact with a larger number of people than they see in reality. It seems to me that this is a story of migration to another world, and because of this, there is a gap that can turn out to be tragic between the real person and the image transmitted to the world,” Volodina added.

In The real cicadasThe author wanted to show how attached teenagers are to their virtual masks. Moreover, these masks are as old as this world: a rebel, a hero, the beauty of the class. But these labels become clearer when they are supported not only in personal communication but also on social networks. As a result, bullying has become easier.

“We all prefer to chat rather than talk in person”

But if we leave school behind, the Zoomers generation is much larger than millennials and all previous generations, they appreciate their own boundaries and care about their health, including mental health. According to Asya Volodina, they even manipulate it. And of course, the smartphone has become an indispensable part of their lives.

“When you receive a lot of information on your phone, there is little in real life that can be more interesting than the content of the smartphone. Even communication has migrated there. By the way, the author of the latest Total Dictation, Anna Matveyeva, came up with the idea that today we are in the era of the literary genre. We are more likely to chat than to meet in person. This isolation and digital world turns out to be closer for Zoomers than connecting with real people, because they have to talk, look into the eyes of real people, interpret, accept, which is too difficult. Whereas in a chat, a person can simply be banned and imagine that all problems are solved. “This is a dangerous story about changing relationships and communications, which seem to be becoming easier. But this simplification, in the end, leads to a certain complication in reality,” Asya Volodina concluded.

Ekaterina Petrova is a book critic for the online newspaper Realnoe Vremya, author of the Telegram channel Poppy Seed Muffins and founder of the first online book club with subscription Makulatora.

Ekaterina Petrova