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Pushkin as a meme: (the image of the poet in television series and movies of 2016/2017th)

I. L. Savkina
$2.50

 

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.2-18.094

 

Savkina Irina L.,

PhD, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Communication Sciences

Degree Programme in Russian Language, Culture and Translation,

School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies

University of Tampere, Finland

e-mail: irina.savkina@staff.uta.fi

 

The purpose of the article is to review different ways of using cultural heritage and significant patterns of the classical literature in modern Russian popular culture. We will study the today's perception of Pushkin's myth by the authors and the audience of TV series and by authors of Internet memes with “Pushkin's symbolics”. By analyzing two TV series of 2016 (Pushkin and To marry Pushkin) and a film Saving Pushkin of 2017 (all of them being comedies about present everyday life), as well as data from the Internet we will propose the assumption that modern popular culture is actively creating a simplified  image of Pushkin or provides a “revitalization of the monument”. In the research data the conventional Pushkin's figure is mainly presented as the incarnation of all good and “ours”, as a model of non-ideological human normality. Pushkin remains “our everything”. Meanwhile, in modern mass culture this iconical status of the great poet is less and less connected with his works, biography, views, etc. Pushkin is not an idol, not a monument, he is a meme.

Keywords: popular culture, reception of the classical canon, Pushkin's myth, comedy TV series, Internet meme.

 

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