Turgenev’s Anniversaries in the Memorial Culture of the Soviet Era

Abstract

The memory of the past is one of the supporting structures of society. Contributing orientation in time and space to society, the memory acts as a connection between the present and the future. With the help of memory, society maintains its identity. What society remembers or forgets is the cultural core of its values and meanings. Being the representation of the past, versatile and selective memory is undergone to constant reorganization in the society in accordance with the demands of the present. The Soviet project, aimed at forming of a new society and a person, offered also its own project of the past, created its culture of memory. Ideas about the past changed along with the change of the Soviet present and the vision of its future. An important component of the culture of memory are the commemorations. Anniversaries of signifcant events and historical fgures allow to organize the work of the past in the present, to enter them into the current cultural space. The anniversary reading of the classic authors of Russian literature in the Soviet period was associated with the idea of mastering the cultural heritage of the past by the working people. The methods and forms of their memorialization, aimed at mass perception and appropriation, corresponded to the heroic matrix, which played the main role in the institutionalization of the Soviet collective whole. This matrix, based on the class-party principle, had two successive profles: revolutionary-international and nationalpatriotic. In the Soviet period there were several important dates in memory of Ivan Turgenev. Honorings of the writer complied with a certain canon. Turgenev’s works were primarily understood from the point of view of their social signifcance, in the context of both the Turgenev era and the Soviet era. Its multivalent potential was mainly considered from two aspects: the service to the revolution and the service toRussia.