«Ташкентский фронт» (на материале фольклорной повседневности и литературы)

Abstract

For about a century and a half, Tashkent was part of the region of Russian statehood. During this time, the toponym Tashkent has enriched the Russian language with a number of phraseological expressions. For example, back in the 19th century, the ironic phrase “gentlemen of Tashkent” arose thanks to Saltykov-Shchedrin. In a considerable number of “Tashkent” phraseological units we meet the “Tashkent front”. The present paper appeals to this precedent text, a kind of slander that appears during the Great Patriotic War. On the basis of memoir and fiction (diaries and memories of Vs. Ivanov, K. Chukovsky, L. Chukovskaya, E. Meletinsky and narratives by V. Nekrasov, K. Simonov and N. Gromova), the author considers this phraseologism in its existence context that gives rise both to its component parts (“Tashkent medals”, “Tashkent partisans”) and ambiguous interpretations (the real approach of the “German” to Tashkent, the rescuing locus and the labor front, the recent military past). In the context of K. Simonov's short novel “Twenty days without war” and N. Gromova's archival novels, the author examines a traumatic stage in a biography of the Soviet poet V. Lugovsky accused by his contemporaries of dodging the war on the “Tashkent front”. The study also mentions the name of Nikolai Karazin — in the form of a pattern of Central Asian wars, significant both for the writer Simonov and for the historical and cultural meta-text.