РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ОБРАЗА ЦЕЛИННИКА В СОВЕТСКОМ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОМ КИНЕМАТОГРАФЕ

Abstract

The article identifies, interprets and compares the artistic images of «virgin lands workers» formed by the Soviet cinema, which is an important channel of the nation's historical memory and a means of communication of our time. The work gives a detailed description of the problem's historiography. A conclusion is made about the predominance of studies devoted to the social-economic, political and environmental consequences of the virgin lands development. At the same time, despite the growing interest of scientists in the social-cultural aspects of the virgin lands campaign in recent decades, there are very few works analyzing the daily life of virgin landers. The article uses various research methods: retrospective, comparative-historical, semiotic, and discourse analysis. In the course of the research, the author determines the features of virgin lands representation in mass culture as a special social-cultural space, shows the hard fate of virgin lands workers, their attitude to the system of values established in the post-war Soviet society. The main characters of the virgin lands epic represented in the cinematography are young people and «competent leaders», without whom it is impossible to imagine the success of major party projects. The attitude of the virgin lands explorers to the global project can be characterized as ambiguous and multi-layered: virgin land is seen both as an important agricultural project, allowing, under favorable circumstances, to solve the «eternal» grain problem, as an important social elevator for Soviet youth, and as a necessary stage of building communism. The study demonstrates both similarities and differences in the ideological and semantic concepts of the virgin lands filmography, and also reveals a certain transformation of directors' artistic ideas: from the propaganda and heroic message characteristic of 1950s films to the authors' desire to reveal the spiritual and moral potency of the campaign's heroes, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s films.