The book of philologist and culturologist Elena Menshikova represents "grotesque consciousness" as a phenomenon natural for Soviet culture, the distinctive feature of which is expressed in the dichotomy of the tragic and comic. The study gives a fundamentally different literary and cultural-philosophical interpretation of such "iconic" works of the 20th century as "Heart of a Dog" by M. Bulgakov, "Envy" by Yu. Olesha, "Chevengur" by A. Platonov, written in a crisis, unstable time, depicting the moment of transition to a new world of unsettled relations, a change in the hierarchical scale of values.