Abstract

The article examines the discursive practices of the Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP/RAPP) as a form of breaking from the symbolic linguistic capital of pre-revolutionary Russia. Mass character, a fundamentally new feature of proletarian writers’ organizations, required the development of an institutional language – as a mechanism of control and suppression, as a language of ideological unanimity. The dictionary of literary criticism and the development of slogans that concentrated the language policy of the time (“Not a fellow traveler, but an ally or an enemy”) became the area of “rupture” and processing. This work began from the very first days of the existence of proletarian writers’ organizations and pushed aside all other issues, including aesthetic ones: any dispute, any discussion, ultimately, were disputes about words, for choosing the right nomination, the right referential apparatus. Later, the arsenal of mastered means of unification was replenished with the right taken by proletcritics to limit the “utterance function” – what can be said. The explanatory dictionary edited by Ushakov and Stalin’s work Marxism and Questions of Linguistics consolidated the destruction of the social and value discord of the word, and annihilated the people’s right to ideological disagreement.

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