chernukha

It should be emphasized that, although Petrushevskaia's subject matter is weighty, serious, often horrific, her texts abundant in image of loss, death, and difficult love, and her awareness of social problems acute, her style is the factor that raises her work above other practitioners of 'chernukha'.

2000, Sally Dalton-Brown, Voices from the Void: The Genres of Liudmila Petrushevskaia

Purveyors of screen chernukha, caught up in the late- and post-Soviet 'pathos of pure negation', threw out several perfectly useful babies with the Bolshevik-tainted bathwater, including: (1) narrative coherency, rejected by virtue of its association with Soviet film and perhaps also because it smacked of teleology […]

2008, S. Hutchings, Russia and its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue

There are welcome flashes of humor throughout, particularly the dark, sardonic strain that Russians call chernukha. Watching his hapless father speak about his passion project — a homemade space capsule to be used in the event of a nuclear war — Alexei remarks that “his cheeks remained red with excitement and dermatitis.”

2015 October 23, Alex Halberstadt, “‘The Tsar of Love and Techno,’ by Anthony Marra”, in New York Times