Forms of actualization of the historical past on posters and in poems of the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

The article is dedicated to comprehending the variants of actualization of the historical past in poetry and on posters of 1941–1945. Fostering respect for the past became one of the goals of the pre-war years’ propaganda. But art revealed stronger forms of time connection than the mere knowledge of history by contemporaries. The aim of the article is to establish similar types of representation of the past in poetry and poster art. According to Benveniste’s “principle of nonredundancy”, the codes of the arts are mutually untranslatable, so the objectives of the study include establishing the specifics of the forms of actualizing the past in each of arts under study. The simplest type is the spatial (on the poster) or temporal (in poetry) division of history and modernity. Narrative and comparative techniques, each in their own way, speak about the possibility of victory through an appeal to the precedent. On the poster, a multi-frame composition conveys this message. In poetry, composition is a level that is almost not used to express the concepts I am interested in. Retrospection can be introduced in any part of the text and is supported by comparative constructions, semantics of adverbs and pronoun, the special dynamics of verb tense forms. In other types, history is present in modernity. This can happen indirectly through the inclusion in the plane of the present cultural signs of the past: monuments or books. They do not point to real events, but to actual historical ideas and myths. The most effective force is works that implement the metaphor of the past helping in the battles. For this, poster artists created a special two-level composition with a coloristic opposition of the planes and their comparison at the level of poses’ and figures’ identity. The past personifies in the person of the glorified generals and naval commanders, and poetry also recreates the resurrection and participation in modernity of nameless, seemingly unheroic ancestors. The pragmatics of addressing the past in such works was different – they evoked a sense of responsibility to history. The past was also actualized in the concept of the immortal collective body of the people. When implementing this idea, poetry does not abandon the linear development of time, describing the historical path of the people as the centuries-old life of the giant individual. The poster, which focuses on only one point, reveals the soul of ancient warriors in contemporaries. Posters with deformed shadows become the means of embodying this idea. Finally, the past appears in the form of reincarnation of heroes. Formally such works are devoid of a second plane, but it is present in the form of allusions that establish an internal or external similarity of modern heroes with a historical person. This type, like the previous one, speaks of the embodiment of national typical features in contemporaries – the most reliable form of the presence of the past in the present.