Abstract

The purpose of the study is to review the representation of the local and temporal plane of the image of the city in the newspapers of Kharkiv higher education institutions in the 1960–1980s. Th e study uses printed publications of three higher education institutions of Kharkiv – Kharkiv State University and Kharkiv Polytechnic and Aviation Institutes. The research methodology. The study of the temporal dimension of the image of the city is performed following the principles of historical urbanism and imagology. Symbolic markers of urban space have been analyzed using the method of mental mapping. Th e method of oral history has also been used in the study. Th e concept of the outstanding linguist Yu. Shevelyov, who singled out several images of Kharkiv that existed in diff erent periods of its history has come to be the matrix of the study of the temporal image of the city. The scientifi c novelty of the study is that the article explores the image of Kharkiv through the prism of printed publications of higher educational institutions of the city for the fi rst time. The study has discovered that the history of Kharkiv was covered in a rather biased way in the Soviet print media, and some events that were inconvenient for the ruling regime were completely silenced. The presentation of the history of the imperial period of Kharkiv is fully adapted to the Soviet historical concept, in which the vision of the past passes through the prism of class struggle. There is no mention of the Cossack origin of the city and the era of Ukrainization. Instead, the importance of key moments in Soviet history for Kharkiv’s development is emphasized: the establishment of Bolshevik rule and the liberation of the city from the Nazi occupation in 1943. Kharkiv appears to newspaper readers as a largely industrial city and as a center of science and educationaft erwards. Th e brand of Kharkiv is much less mentioned as a city of students and youth. Kharkiv’s urban names are completely dominated by the names of Soviet party fi gures, participants in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, who were not always associated with the city’s past. In general, the mental map of Kharkiv in the pages of periodicals of Kharkiv higher education institutions depicts the city through the prism of Soviet fi gures, values, and symbols. Instead, there is almost no trace of urbanonyms that would be related to Kharkiv’s history. Conclusions. Th rough the prism of the Soviet view, the symbolic space of the city and the idea of its past, relevant to contemporaries, appear on the pages of periodicals of Kharkiv higher education institutions. Th e image of the city disseminated in periodicals served as a repeater of the Soviet vision of history and, in general, contributed to the education of Soviet values in thestudent environment. Modern for readers, Kharkiv looked like an industrial-scientifi c, purely Soviet, denationalized city, the names of objects and monuments of which refl ect mainly the Soviet worldview.

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