“LOVE OF WORKER BEES”: YURI LUZHKOV

Abstract

The article continues an authored series of psycho-political analysis of self-portraits of politicians of the Soviet era. The previous materials were devoted to Soviet party and state figures - Lazar Kaganovich and Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev, Andrei Gromyko and Alexandra Kollontai. This article focuses, within the framework of the research paradigm of political linguistics, on the analysis of the autobiographical narrative of Yu. M. Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow for about twenty years. The aim of the study is to show the strategy of reading and comprehension of the autobiography of a political leader as a communicative role act authorizing the politician's self-awareness and selfpresentation. The study shows how linguocultural associative stable stereotypes, in fact archetypes, help a politician to construct his autobiography and thereby construct himself. The research is carried out in the paradigm of modern narratology, which looks at the text from the point of view of its fictionality (fiction) and factuality (reality). The study analyzes the book by Yu. Luzhkov “Moscow and Life”. This text is not an autobiography in the sense that it does not aim to tell about the events of the author's life; it is a work offiction. Luzhkov assigns himself the role of the main reformer and compares his activity with that of Peter the Great. The image of the narrator in Luzhkov's “autobiography” breaks up into a whole range of different and sometimes mutually exclusive manifestations. Luzhkov's political views turn out to be organically associated with the biographical problem of personality formation, and political freedom — with the problem of personal independence.