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19Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 5 (2017 10) 741-752
УДК 82-95
Traditionalism/Conservatism of the Art of the Thaw Period in the Context of Social and Cultural Transformations
Tatiana A. Kruglova*
Ural Federal University named after the First President of Russia
B.N. Yeltsin
51 Lenina, Ekaterinburg, 620083, Russia
Received 10.01.2017, received in revised form 28.02.2017, accepted 14.03.2017
The article is devoted to the analysis of the art culture of the "ottepel" (the "thaw " period) (the middle 1950's - the late 1960's) through a prism of the relation between social traditions and the discourse of traditionalism. A subject of the analysis is the creative works of the liberal wing of intelligentsia ("the Sixtiers") and their attitude towards the socialist project. The article proposes a hypothesis as follows: in the event of inactivity of the mechanism of a social tradition, the reproduction of the Soviet project is implemented based on the traditionalist discourse that is expressed in the rhetoric of the "loyalty to the fathers", the "connection between generations" and the "responsibility". The traditionalist discourse is supposed to hide the trauma that has appeared as a result of the inability to have a normal social continuity in the new social and cultural conditions. In terms of the artistic techniques we can observe a setting toward the search of a "zone of great meanings", the imitation of reloading of the socialist project on a new level.
Keywords: art of the "thaw", creative work of the "Sixtiers", social tradition, traditionalist discourse, Soviet liberal intelligentsia.
DOI: 10.17516/1997-1370-0080.
Research area: philology.
Introduction into the problem
Artistic culture of the twentieth century has entered textbooks and final works in history and philosophy of art, the majority of which have been written from the standpoint of classical or modernist aesthetics. As a rule, the logic of these works is driven by the search for innovations in language, institutional existence and a way to exhibit works of art. In such optics, history of art
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* Corresponding author E-mail address: [email protected]
appears as a series of continuous experiments, and phenomena and artefacts that do not meet these criteria fall either in the marginal position or are interpreted as a temporary state of reaction or stagnation. The innovative dominates the conservative and the traditionalist as a criterion for the selection of works of art. But there are concepts that challenge the notion of a linear and ascending vector of the artistic development,
for example, the model of V. Papernyi who proposed a two-step diagram of the dynamics of Russian culture: culture 1 and culture 2, each of which is responsible for different phases of development (Papernyi, 1996). Among the many characteristics of these two stages, we can also distinguish those that are associated with an orientation toward the future or the past, in other words, toward a revolutionary or conservative type of culture. Following the logic of V. Papernyi, the conservative stage of Stalinism with its blatant anti-modernist pathos -Culture 2 is replaced with a new turn of Culture 1 during the Khrushchev thaw. It would seem that the desire for renewal, the orientation of the "Sixtiers" toward the ideology of liberalism, Western modernism and actualization of the art of the revolutionary 1920's speak for themselves. A judgment about "socialist modernism" of the Sixtiers has occurred and formed in the literature of art history.
Recognizing the productivity of such a view on history of the Russian/Soviet art, we cannot fully accept it. The contemporary sociological and cultural-anthropological studies of post-Stalin culture prove that, in this period, not only did the Soviet system not dismantle the previous type of a social fabric, but, on the contrary, strengthened it by creating the possibilities of prolonging the historical life of the socialist project with the help of new cultural practices and art. This circumstance compels us to pay attention to the fact that conservatism of the twentieth century is extremely heterogeneous; it includes the opposite aesthetic platforms, including the non-conformist ones.
A relevant task of philosophy of art is to understand conservatism and modernism as two sides of one process. Our position is to see conservative, restorative, archaic, fundamentalist elements not as manifestations of refusal of modernization, but as a backside of the modernist
project (Kruglova, 2013). In other words, to try to discern the inner artistic ambivalence, the complex dialectics of the conservative and the non-conservative in modernity. In this case, conservatism does not appear as a separate type of artistic practice or a certain historical stage, but as a hidden side of the conflict with modernity. A. Rykov has expressed an extremely important idea that conservatism of modernity is always a claim to the version of modernity as a more "genuine", "healthy" tradition of neo-conservatism, his rhetoric of "preservation of the old" is deceptive (Rykov, 2007). The art as the most operative and sensitive tool for responding to hidden socio-cultural processes provides great opportunities for exploring a nature of the conflict with modernity in an environment that is most often qualified as a liberal wing of the "thaw" generation.
Statement of the problem
The subject of the research in this article is the interaction between available social traditions in Russian culture and the discourse of traditionalism. We proceed from the premise that it is necessary to distinguish two types of information about traditions obtained by methods of different sciences: social sciences (ethnology, cultural anthropology, sociology) and the humanities (art history, literary study). In the course of discussing the problem of the specifics of artistic conservatism or traditionalism in Russia, it is first necessary to understand the notion of what is understood by the national traditions in the public consciousness and science today. Secondly, there is a need to reveal the signs in the artistic world of the "thaw", which are the signals of the influence and authority of the discourse of traditionalism in its specific "loyalty" to the Soviet cultural code.
All variety of judgments about a tradition can be reduced to two opposite positions:
primordialism and constructivism. Primordialism based on the naturalistic interpretation of the tradition understands it as a kind of path, destiny that the nation is fatally doomed to. In this concept, traditions are interpreted as pre-defined programs, inescapable and unchangeable entities; in a sense, it is a "curse" of a nation. Another extreme is social constructivism: the traditions are created or cancelled as a result of concerted efforts. There is also a concept of "invented traditions" that emerge to achieve legitimacy of certain reforms. The invented traditions can later be transformed into ordinary traditions.
In addition, there is another difficulty in determining the essence of tradition: it is often confused with what looks like it - with a phenomenon of repeatability. If a tradition, in the broadest sense, is a phenomenon of cultural heredity, in other words, it has a mechanism of self-reproduction in any circumstances of place and time, then there are phenomena whose repeatability we can determine, but the origin of this repetition has a completely different source. Here is what E. Pain says about this: "There is no use in the extensive interpretation of cultural traditions. For example, there are different types of sustained, recurring diseases, and it is important for medicine to understand whether the disease is genetic, transmitted by inheritance or professional. In one case, a person himself and his genotype act as a carrier of the disease-causing phenomena, and in another case, the environment - coal mines with their dust, open hearth furnaces with their heat or compressor plants with their noise. I am interested in the same separation of phenomena, only in the sphere of culture. Is a sustained stereotype of a lack of respect for the law a tradition that is inherited (not by genes, but through social translation channels), or is it an attribute of certain social relations? I am wondering whether it is related to the properties of culture or, to a greater extent, to
the peculiarities of political institutions." (Pain, 2008).
Clear criteria for allocating works of traditional mechanisms are justified in ethno-methodology. Sociologists and cultural anthropologists have developed a concept of "social relay", which is a necessary mechanism for ensuring the work of tradition. The social relay provides not a fictional, but a real connection between generations, a direct transfer of experience, and fixes social norms of behaviour. The social relay is a technology of tradition and a system of its protection. It includes the direct transfer of samples through learning, institutions and social control (Pain, 2008). Thus, there is a tool that allows a scientifically based division of social traditions. For example, the behaviour of bureaucrats around the world has a lot of similar characteristics that are reproduced as if in addition to intentions and desires of people, and this occurs in societies that are different in cultural and social codes. E. Pain believes that, in this case, it is hardly productive to talk about the "tradition of bureaucracy". It is also not possible to refer those phenomena that arise as a result of adaptation to the changing conditions of the social environment to the tradition. E. Pain calls them "social reflexes". The studies of researchers using the ethno-methodological tools prove that the social communities having the same cultural and traditional base and having been put in different historical circumstances behave differently. Cultural traditions are not abolished, but begin to work in a different regime helping to adapt to new circumstances.
Based on methods of these sciences, it is possible to identify the presence of traditions in any region or social environment and measure the intensity of their manifestation. Such studies have been conducted and, as a result, it has been concluded that Russia does not suffer from the fact that its national traditions hamper
the modernization processes, as seen on the surface of public discussions, but it suffers from the destruction of traditions. The level of manifestation of the traditional mechanisms is the lowest in Russia. Social relays do not work. The old traditions have crumbled, and the new cultural norms do not catch on well. The reproduction of collectivity is disarrayed. In the Russian environment there is a very high degree of breakdown of family ties. In a society with destroyed traditions, a completely different mechanism begins to work, let us call it traditionalism without traditions. If we talk about the role of discourse (in this case the traditionalist one), then it is necessary to fix a gigantic discrepancy between the values advocated by art and the values accepted in society and objectifying themselves in everyday practices. Our hypothesis is that the discourse of traditionalism conceals within itself a focus on compensation for the losses of the social relay signalling the presence of ways of replacing social traditions with ideological rhetoric and artistic practices in culture.
The problem of reproducibility
of the connection of generations in the "thaw" period
In order to prove the introduced hypothesis, let us turn to the analysis of the "thaw" period to understand how things are with the social traditions in this period.
It is well known that the "thaw" was a reaction to the previous, Stalinist period of Soviet culture. Let us briefly characterize the specifics of the discourse of traditionalism of the Stalinist period. The Stalinist conservative revolution was part of a process common to a number of European countries, when a modernization bound forward was based on the actualization of archaic structures in a social life (Trencsenyi, 2009), the appropriation and conversion of the
national and world classics in artistic culture (Raku, 2014, Kruglova, 2016). V. Shklovskiy called this process "red restoration". If the Stalinist stage of the "great return" - the term of N. Timashev (Adamovich, 2004) - is described in scientific literature (Vishnevskii, 1998), and its restoration essence is undoubted, then the thesis on the existence of the traditionalist component in the Khrushchev thaw appears very controversial and needs detailed proof. At this stage of reasoning we can only affirm one thing with full confidence: Stalinist conservatism and the traditionalist discourse of the "thaw" can be understood as variants of Soviet traditionalism as a "return to the origins", which are different in semantics and pragmatics, but connected by continuity.
Let us turn to a version of V. Mikhailin, since he was the first who distinguished signs of traditionalist ways of thinking in the liberal stream of the 1960's. He sees the origins of the thaw traditionalism in the specifics of implementation of the project on creation of a "Soviet man". V. Mikhailin formulates a set of qualities that is attributed to the future Soviet man according to the ideological program: "It was supposed to be a basic orientation towards combination of one's own individual destiny with "great" stories and readiness to sacrifice the personal interests for the "great" goals. <...> The Soviet man was supposed to be an ideal mobilization unit, for which the narrow private contexts make sense as long as they are inscribed in the logic of the total reorganization of being - or do not make any sense at all. He was supposed to become an active participant in this reorganization measuring his own existence not with sets of domestic, local trifles, but with prospects of a truly world-wide scale" (Mikhailin, 2016).
It is possible to check if this project was implemented by using the concept of a social relay, which can be understood as a set of social
traditions. If social traditions that contribute to reproduction of cultural norms and practices, values and motives of actions are revealed, then it means that the Soviet man exists as a socio-historical type. In search of an answer to this question, let us turn to the studies of sociologists and cultural anthropologists who studied the cultural practices of Soviet people throughout the whole Soviet period: from the beginning of the formation of social institutions of the personality production at the turn of the 1920's-1930's, in the period of the 1950's-1960's ("the thaw") and, finally, in the late Soviet period ("stagnation"). In our view, the most representative works are the studies of N. Kozlova (Kozlova, 2005), O. Kharkhordin (Kharkhordin, 2002), A. Iurchak (Iurchak, 2014), respectively.
Let us formulate a brief summary of all the listed sources based on a frame of "social traditions" set by us. It is revealed that the formation of a Soviet man was carried out in a so-called "reforging" regime that forced a person to adapt to constantly changing rules and circumstances, to develop life skills in collectives, to contribute to a common cause, to be able to subordinate personal interests to the public ones. However, the analysis of a large historical segment that includes several generations showed that these new social habits were getting dissolved unexpectedly quickly, if not supported by special regulatory or supervisory institutions. In other words, they were mostly adaptive in nature and were not fixed by the mechanism of the social relay. Their repetitive nature should not be misleading, since the reproduction of the practices of collectivism was increasingly acquiring a ritual nature in subsequent periods. O. Kharkhordin describes a variety of practices that arise together with the official norms of behaviour giving rise to an effect called as a specific Soviet hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, "double consciousness" (Kormer, 1989) and a state of
outsidedness (Iurchak, 2014) - all this indicates that Soviet social traditions did not occurred at all or, even if they existed, were not the main and effective means of human reproduction. But these parallel, adaptive types of behavior did not supersede the practices officially accepted and supported by the authorities and did not become the basis of independent traditions. Thus, the strength of social fabric was kept on some other grounds, which we will consider below.
Let us return to the explanation offered by V. Mikhailin. In his opinion, the basic orientation toward combining an individual life and a "great" narrative hung on to the perspiciation. This concept - "perspiciation" - means a process of making public space more transparent. "The main purpose of this process is to increase the level of social control, including through the manipulative use of micro-group cultural codes appealing to sustainable settings at the level of an individual and a small group. An example is such metaphors like "motherland", in which one of the members refers to a family code, and the other is an abstract concept, the real content of which radically exceeds the capabilities of our memory and our attention. As a result, an unreflected liability for a set of circumstances that cannot be controlled is imputed to the person: a perfect ground for further manipulation" (Mikhailin, 2015).
Let us distinguish a category of liability that is important for our further research. Let us pay attention to the fact that this liability, firstly, is extremely large-scale and incommensurable with the limited capabilities of an individual. Secondly, due to the above-mentioned gap between expectations and resources, liability acquires a somewhat phantom nature. And this inevitably entails the prevalence of irrational interpretations of liability, the inability to measure it, and, accordingly, the unrepresentability of the consequences of one's own actions and
their connection with social events. The Soviet man finds himself in a complicated existential situation: he is imputed a huge, inordinate liability for the fate of the whole country and even for the world as a whole. He is overloaded with responsibility and constantly inclined to feel guilty for all the failures and misfortune, no matter how large they were. The key phrase that becomes a kind of spell is the title of the movie "I am in charge of everything". However, at the same time, the Soviet man automatically had to feel a sense of pride in the success of the whole country. This tied an individual to the society much more than traditions. In addition, it ensured continuity between generations bypassing the mechanism of a social relay: the generation of soldiers of the Patriotic War was linked with the generation of the Revolution and the Civil War by responsibility. Thus, it is not a matter of following the traditions of collectivism, communist ideology, Soviet patriotism - this whole set of education rhetoric - but a matter of organization of life in society with the discourse support (Prokhorov, 2007).
What happened to this way of preserving and reproducing the Soviet society during the "thaw" period? By the turn of the 1950's-1960's the next generation - the children of war - had entered the historical arena. The situation of perspiciation placed them in a position that gave them anxiety and a sense of uncertainty about the position they occupy in the society. Previous generations not only participated in a ritual of devotion and responsibility experiencing strong emotional ties with the Big Family, but also were involved in large-scale processes: the revolution, the Civil War, industrialization, collectivization, campaigns to eliminate illiteracy. They built, fought, rebuilt, suffered. They paid a huge price for the world inherited by the young people of the 1960's. They lived their lives in a situation where the ritual was woven into social fabric,
sometimes to the total indistinguishability of the heroic discourse and real practices on the verge of self-wasting. By the end of the 1950's, there were no large-scale projects left, they still had to be offered by young people, as, for example, it began to happen with youth construction projects and the development of virgin lands. By definition, the space project could not become a mass one, and therefore it was not considered as a mobilization resource.
So, the Sixtiers inherited the discourse of liability, which at that time was implemented in the context of the total ritualization of the public sphere. This ritualization caused a protest, and therefore the alternative was seen as sincerity, which was supposed to return effectiveness to the discourse of the generation ties. But there was one more important circumstance making the implementation of continuity either impossible or very difficult. The fact that liability was taken outside the limits of the experience of an individual and his limited ability to influence the large-scale events of the country was also at the time of Stalinism, but due to the constant voluntary-compulsory mobilization it remained unrevealed, almost invisible. And in the peaceful and relatively prosperous, "vegetarian" sixties it began to come to the surface, to reveal itself as a loophole, as a dangerous gap between generations. Let us recall the reaction of N.S. Khrushchev to the film "I Am Twenty" (Zastava Iliycha): the youth swears by the memory of the fathers who died at war in fidelity to the ideals of the Revolution, the International, and the authorities do not believe them intuitively feeling that the youth lives by some other rules and evades without rebelling. This intuition was absolutely adequate: honouring the memory of the fathers and not wanting any other life than the Soviet, the liberal youth could no longer reproduce those social practices that were in the asset of the two previous generations. They were
impossible, just like the soldier's habits become useless in peacetime. The new generation is left to experience vague but strong feelings of "involvement", "loyalty", which are extremely emotionally demonstrated and should not cause doubts in their sincerity. The discourse of "loyalty to traditions", the cultivation of the "connection of generations" is not accidentally expressed in a strongly espoused discourse of sincerity, even its apology, as it directly corresponds with enthusiasm, selflessness and other similar mobilization states.
Origins and features of the "thaw" traditionalism
Thus, the gaps between the real practices of the Sixtiers and the discourse of liability had to be overcome. The way out of this situation was found in the rhetoric of returning to Leninist norms, restoring the ideals of the Revolution, criticizing the cult of personality. It was about loyalty to very specific traditions - socialist, revolutionary. The thaw restart of the communist project was based on the new Soviet traditionalism. It was not the "peasants", but a cohort of liberal-minded intellectuals who took up a mission of ensuring the continuity of the socialist project. Since that moment, certain splits have arisen in the traditionalist discourse itself: groups of cultural figures began to look for a support in completely different mental and historical worlds, but they all had a common shaky ground under their feet (Z. Bauman believes that violation of the reproduction of collectivity can lead to collapse) and the desire to find benchmarks through a "recovery" strategy. Traditionalism, as we wrote above, arises as a result of the conflict with the modernity, in this case - the concealed one, because on the surface the world view and aesthetics of the liberal wing of the Sixtiers stylistically looks emphatically modern. Moreover, we have a reason to strengthen
this conclusion: the traditionalist discourse of the Sixtiers is a traumatic reaction to the intuitively perceived impossibility of realizing a socialist project in the context of a taboo on criticism and revision of the original plan, for which their fathers and grandfathers paid their lives. They are forced both by circumstances and their obligations to bear the burden of responsibility for both victories and for 1937. The concentrated expression of this position is represented in the final monologue of Sergei, the main character of the "I Am Twenty" movie. The oath of allegiance prohibits analytical procedures potentially fraught with a complete deconstruction of the Soviet system.
One way or another, actualization of the rhetoric of "return" allows us to discern the signs of traditionalist discourse in the thaw progressism, liberalism and orientation toward the West in its universal understanding. Let us study the definition of traditionalism and conservatism as discourses, from the internal differences of which we can abstract to some extent. Conservatism, unlike other parts of the socio-political spectrum, is always characterized by vagueness of its worldview elements; it seems to elude rationalization and clear verbal formulas. The most famous interpretation of conservatism was proposed by K. Mannheim in his "Conservative Thought", where he showed that conservatism as a style of thinking has a certain unity, although it is not so easy to see. L. Ionin, retelling the concept of Mannheim, writes: "This is not ideology or methodology, but rather a set of general principles of perception and comprehension of reality; <...> The main idea of metaphysics of conservatism is the idea of irrationality, integrity and organicity of reality, which at its very core does not lend itself to analytic dissolution" (Ionin, 2010: 79). The society must solve its problems (to be reformed, restored) on its own grounds, without trusting abstract and
universal formulas. A myth of "eternal return" lying in the depths of modernism, programs a shuttle movement back as a way out of the crisis into a zero point of genesis, into archaism or, more often, into the chimerical image of the past harmony. Let us note, in this case it is a question of the lost connection with the generation of "fiery revolutionaries". In order to make another leap forward, we must symbolically return to the starting point - the revolution.
An understanding of traditionalism similar to conservatism is also demonstrated by V. Mikhailin: "By the phrase "traditionalist mentality" one should understand a rather loose complex of ideas about the existence of some kind of original knowledge... in comparison with which the present state of humanity can be considered as a period of decline" (Mikhailin, 2016). Proceeding from this premise, in the Khrushchev thaw Mikhailin discovers attempts to "resuscitate a sense of the presence of certain primordial, the only true entities behind all these words and thoroughly ritualized practices. In fact, the famous thaw sincerity is a familiar cure from the total and meaningless ritualization. If you cannot understand it - feel it; if you do not believe in words and gestures - see the meanings that stand behind these words and gestures, regardless of their present emptiness, since these meanings were present in them from the very beginning. During Lenin's period everything was real and everything had real meaning" (Mikhailin, 2016). This conclusion can be confirmed by reference to the enormous popularity of A. Voznesenskii's poem "Nostalgia for the Present" that became a kind of prayer, manifesto, credo and appeal for the audience of the Sixtiers.
Representation of thaw traditionalism in art
The thaw art, in all its variety of forms and stylistics, does the same thing: it "teaches a
Soviet man to feel and seek meanings hidden from the everyday view blurred by the ordinariness" (Mikhailin, 2016). But only a part of artists, albeit a significant one, searched for meanings in the newly constructed memory of the revolution and the Civil War, translating the subjects, motives and behaviour of characters into the language of modern poetics. The Soviet everyday life was subjected to procedures of careful scrutinization and searching beyond its surface for something much more significant (genuine, holistic, deep, existential, eternal, real). This "present" could never be subordinated to the utilitarian use or to the analytic dismemberment. V. Mikhailin offers a kind of inventory of settings, from which different artists proceeded in their search for the "hidden" and the "original". We refer to one of them: "it is the categorical necessity of some kind of comprehensive perspective capable to "assign meanings" to any, sometimes very diverse and multi-ordinal phenomena. At the same time, the meanings themselves are not subject to the analysis: the fact of their presence behind the "surface of things" and the sense that they constitute a single semantic field are significant" (Mikhailin, 2016).
Let us pay attention to Mikhaillin's remark that "the meanings are not subject to the analysis". Indeed, cinematography clearly shows a tendency of significance that is justified neither by the plot nor by the characters, but is important itself. There are a lot of ways to represent it: silent and long-smoking characters, endless plans, slow rhythms and a lot of music (especially the manner of making music of M. Tariverdiev) that creates the mood of an elegy with a flavour of sad and sweet nostalgia. Long walks around the big city, crowds of flaneurs strolling in a state of negligence are the signs that pass from film to film. Urban scenes can be dynamized and saturated with a human and mechanical movement, as in "The July Rain", "Tenderness", "Once Upon
a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird", or, on the contrary, they are totally devoid of any dynamics, as in the works of A. Tarkovskii, R. Khamdamov, S. Paradzhanov. Finally, "they can be built on a close-up of a random human face" (Mikhailin, 2016). Conversations on the move, about important things - on the way. Domination of the accidental, the non-optional should not be misleading: it is not exactly neo-realism that opened to the world the life by surprise, on top of any schemes and predetermined values. In Soviet neo-realism, the viewer's eye is fixed on the immediate subject of observation only in order to emphasize: "the visible is something that must be overcome if you intend to really "understand" (Mikhailin, 2016). The flow of reality is periodically interrupted by the monologue of one of the characters, most often by the author's alterego, and a precise grasp of the essence of what is to be understood is given in a literary flawless style. Literature-centrism continues to dominate in the works of M. Kalatozov, M. Khutsiev and A. Tarkovskii. This is a signal that the original neo-realistic poetics, similar to the Italian one, could not have arisen in the Soviet cinema, since everyday life never became an object that was aesthetically and existentially self-valuable.
Thus, keeping the sphere of meanings in a zone of uncertainty, within the limits that the intellect does not have the right to go beyond, has generated an effect of the genre blurring: films of the thaw did not fit into the framework of consistent social realism, the French new wave of J. Godard, the existentialist dramas of M. Antonioni. A dread of an intellectual effort forcing to discover the truth in its tragic mode was caused, among other things, by the unspoken prohibition of doubt in the original harmony of being that does not require proof.
There is a great temptation to see manifestations of the national Russian mental tradition in this. Its limitations were
insinuatingly described by the "Vekhovtsy" when they noted that the Russian philosophical consciousness is not concerned with reflection on the questions of metaphysics, but inclined to turn the conceptualization vector into a practical and moral plane. But it seems important for us to pinpoint a socio-cultural context of the sixties in this readiness for an indefinite, but inviting zone of uncertain shimmering transcendental meanings. This context was characterized by the precise expression of L. Anninskii as "unsupported spirituality".
The list of poetic techniques can be continued, but in one way or another we already have a set of features similar to those that form the basis of the traditionalist narrative. We face the need for a special "zone of great meanings" untranslatable into the language of everyday life, and the longing for a large narrative. But the main thing is that it allows us to unite a liberal wing of the "thaw", the "Sixtiers", the cohort of "Ilyich's Gate" (poetry of A. Voznesenskii, E. Evtushenko, confessional prose written by V. Aksenov, films by A. Mitta, M. Khutsiev, M. Kalik, etc.) and those traditionally referred to the intellectual (author's) cinematography (A. Tarkovskii, S. Pardzhanov, I. Averbakh), metaphysical prose and poetry - it is a search for wider explanatory constructions freedfrom the former models of the traditionalist discourse that compromised themselves. All of them have one more important common setting: a cultural and social tradition as the bearer of the "initial meaning" is interpreted by them primordially, which means - naturalistically, as a kind of mystery, as something unchangeable, uncreated, but always existing. And it requires not an analytical-critical attitude in relation to itself, but an intuitive involvement and immersion.
Conclusion
The conclusion made by V. Mikhaylin is formulated as follows: "The late Soviet reality
offered to common man a unique model of existence that allowed him to combine complete (or tending to such) personal irresponsibility before the real world perceived as a system of accidents, with exciting, but nonbinding knowledge of "great meanings" (Mikhailin, 2016). From the logical point of view this conclusion is of no doubt, but the use of other optics does not allow its full acceptance. Following A. Iurchak, "irresponsibility" can be interpreted as a form of manifestation of a kind of internal emigration, or "outsidedness" (Iurchak, 2014). This position allowed a significant number of Soviet people and artists to create over the Soviet code, thus imitating loyalty to Soviet social traditions in practice. In our opinion, in the late Soviet period there was an inconspicuous reformatting of the notion of social responsibility: it was based on loyalty not to the cause of the previous generations that implemented the socialist project, but to a completely different cause. According to I. Plekhanova's insightful remark,
moving into a "zone of great meanings" was the cause of the thaw generation. But we also agree that the creative strategy described by us has become an internal support for prolongation of the Soviet way of life, in which the mechanism of social traditions (social relay) did not work already, and was reproduced mostly thanks to the traditionalist discourse, primarily in its liberal art recension. The traumatic experience of the generation of the "children of war" connected with the impossibility of unifying the responsibility before the "fathers" with the practices of modern life, was not rationalized. Refusal to analyze a situation of mismatches and gaps, a setting of framing the Soviet experience into a zone of "great meanings", thanks to which this experience was to be justified and prolonged, allowed the trauma not to be noticed. But, as we know from the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, a trauma that has not been subjected to reflection procedures will always make itself evident (Travma: punkty, 2009).
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Традиционализм/консерватизм искусства «оттепели» в контексте социокультурных трансформаций
Т.А. Круглова
Уральский федеральный университет им. первого Президента России Б.Н. Ельцина Россия, 620083, Екатеринбург, пр. Ленина, 51
Статья посвящена анализу тенденций художественной культуры «оттепели» (середина 1950-х - конец 1960-х годов) сквозь призму связи социальных традиций и дискурса традиционализма. Предметом анализа стало творчество либерального крыла интеллигенции («шестидесятников»), их отношения к социалистическому проекту. Выдвинута гипотеза о том, что в ситуации отсутствия действия механизма социальной традиции воспроизводство советского проекта осуществляется с опорой на традиционалистский дискурс, который выражается в риторике «верности отцам», «связи поколений», «ответственности». Традиционалистский дискурс призван скрыть травму, возникшую вследствие невозможности осуществлять преемственность на уровне социальной эстафеты в новых социокультурных условиях. На уровне художественных приемов мы отмечаем установку на поиск «зоны больших смыслов», имитацию перезагрузки социалистического проекта на новом уровне.
Ключевые слова: искусство «оттепели», творчество «шестидесятников», социальная традиция, традиционалистский дискурс, советская либеральная интеллигенция.
Научная специальность: 10.00.00 - филологические науки.
