Meaning

A gloomy genre of Russian horror..

Example Sentences

Though the USA came in for severe criticism, it was admitted that at least the Americans had perfected a form for the horror film. The Russians were unsure of genres. One speaker made the helpful observation that we should distinguish between home-grown 'chernukha' and foreign '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'.

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 […]

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.”

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When Should You Use Chernukha?

Use chernukha when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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