VISUALIZATION OF SOVIET CHILDHOOD IN DRAWINGS BY EUGENIYA DVOSKINA

In: RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. "Literary Theory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies" Series, Heft 8, S. 96-115

Abstract

The author explores ways to visualize the everyday life of the Brezhnev period's soviet childhood in a Eugeniya Dvoskina's drawings cycle «#forthosewhoremember». Comparing the artist's work with other modern visual nostalgic projects, the significance of the selected source is justified: this cycle allows us to give an idea of the visual environment of the child, typical kinds of the children's territory, public and private areas in the collective memory of the generation. Based on the methodology of visual sociology (P. Shtompka, O.V. Gavrishina), the author analyzes the reasons for the cycle's perception of the older generation as uniquely "Soviet" and raises the question about markers of "Soviet childhood". The universality and heritability of many children's practices makes them timeless, so the design of the material world and symbols of Soviet ideology are main signs of the historical era. Compositional and graphic solutions of images play an important role for the viewer's perception. Knowledge of nature and artistic skill allows the artist to create heroes with accurate behavioral characteristics and evokes, in addition to visual, almost all types of sensory memory (tactile, motor, audio). The use of accompaniment text, often in the form of speech formulas, is crucial for this effect. If we consider this cycle in the logic of S."Boym's reasoning about nostalgia, drawings about soviet childhood can be attributed to the procedural type of nostalgia, which is characterized by irony and contradictory attitude to the past. Eugeniya Dvoskina's work provides a complex multi-faceted visualization of the everyday life of Soviet childhood in the 60–80s of the XX century.