With Pushkin at the Background. The Linguistic Aspect of Pushkin's Discourse of the 1920s-1930s

The article focuses on the analysis of linguistic means of adapting the literary heritage of the 19th century by the Soviet cultural space using the example of Pushkin's discourse of the 1920s-1930s. At first glance, it seems that the interpretation of Pushkin's heritage was continuous in Russian culture throughout the centuries with the same semantics: the poet as a symbol of national culture. However, in Pushkin's discourse, there is a breakpoint that occurred in the post-revolutionary decade, during the breakdown of the entire cultural tradition in an attempt to establish a new proletarian culture. In order to set the vector for the development of Soviet culture, the Bolsheviks had to solve the cardinal question of their attitude to the literary heritage of the Russian Empire. The option of full assimilation of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage was unacceptable for the Bolsheviks. A complete refusal was also impossible since the Bolsheviks as a whole understood that it was difficult to ignore the age-old cultural tradition. As a result, the new regime, with its perception of the cultural tradition as “cultural baggage”, had to use ideological filters for this baggage. From this point of view, the most representative source is the ideological concepts of the history of the 19th century literature presented as a system in the Literary Encyclopedia in 11 volumes (1929-1939) and in the Small Soviet Encyclopedia (1928-1931), as well as the ways of communicating the concepts to the broad Soviet audience. Pushkin's Soviet discourse is the most indicative example of the changes that occurred in the Russian language in the post-revolutionary era when a version of the Russian language started obeying a new system of meanings and attributed to the text a meaning that was not originally implied or intended by the author. One of the instruments for adapting the pre-revolutionary cultural experience to the Soviet ideological space was the expansion of the semantic field of the key concepts democratic and revolutionary with the help of added context. The added context made any phenomenon of pre-revolutionary culture look “proletarian”, especially those ones which could justify continuity between the “Soviet present” and the “Russian past”. Also, this context divided the cultural tradition into “good past” and “bad past”. Moreover, it caused the emergence of oxymorons in the language that brought together very opposite ideas, such as, for example, “noble revolutionaries”. However, despite the internal inconsistency of Pushkin's Soviet discourse, as evidenced by the oxymoronic nature of its basic concepts, the aim of the “Sovietization” of Pushkin was successfully achieved through the purposeful use of linguistic means.

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