“Victorious” Cliché Phrases as a Narrative Component of the Great Patriotic War Memory Politics.

Abstract

In Russia, in the last decade at the state level considerable attention has been paid to the problems of the memory politics, in particular to the memory of the events and results of the Great Patriotic War. The main actors of this policy are, on the one hand, state institutions and officials, on the other hand, civil society institutions, including non-state media and social networks. Among the ways of representing the memory politics in collective consciousness, we especially highlight cliché phrases. Considering the clichés, which are dedicated to Victory Day and popular among Russians, we note the dominance of victorious meanings and emotions in their substance, which allows us to designate them with the term "victorious". The aim of this article is to classify "victorious" cliché phrases that serve as a narrative component of the memory politics of the Great Patriotic War. Narrative is understood as a plot-formed discourse, which provides a coherent image of historical events. Narrative discourse can be used to convey a particular ideology, certain values and established stereotypes. We consider the discourse of the memory politics as a kind of narrative, the result of a historical narration, which became the subject of particular public scrutiny in post-Soviet states in the first decades of the 21st century. Main sources of the research are materials from popular groups of the social network VKontakte. Based on the content analysis method, there was made a classification of "victorious" cliché phrases related to the celebration of the 9th of May. The classification of cliché phrases was carried out according to such criteria as the form of expression, emotional filling and semantic content. During the classification there was analyzed a communicative structure of clichés, in which the following main components were distinguished: the addresser (the creator or the first disseminator of the cliché), the addressee (the recipient of a semantic message encrypted in the cliché) and the repeater (the recipient of the message who transmits it to other addressees). As a conclusion we noticed a gradual increase in the number of clichés, which call to remember the nationwide Victory exploit as well as focus particular attention on its high price. It is stated that an ordinary addressee can become a repeater, placing new and the most relevant accents in the cliché. Such groups of creative participants in the Internet communication are capable of becoming real actors influencing the adjustment of modern memory politics official commitment.

Keywords

• politics of memory
• historical memory
• clichés
• “victorious” clichés
• slogan
• emotional concept