Corpus Mundi (Jul 2023)
The Corporeality of the Domestic Vampire in the Context of Soviet Nostalgia
Abstract
The article deals with the analysis of the corporeality of Russian vampires, naturalized in the domestic serial cinema at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. The vampire was a marginal character in the Russian cultural tradition of the 19th century, combining folkloric traits with stable motifs of the Western Gothic novel. In Soviet culture, he was a total stranger, since he belonged to the subcensorship theme of mysticism and anti-Soviet propaganda. The vampire expansion of the 1990s strengthened the vampire myth as a Westernized project that assimilated poorly and slowly into domestic soil. Only a reinterpretation of the Soviet Union's image as part of Soviet nostalgia led to a flowering of the national vampire theme. This investigation is aimed at assembling the social body of the vampire clan (Vampires of the Middle Zone, 2021, 2022) into a single whole by means of Soviet nostalgia, which requires us to reconsider the contemporary trends in the dynamics of the canonical corporeality of the vampire in Western mass culture and to apply them to the Soviet-oriented model of Russian history. The author demonstrates the peculiarities of the Smolensk vampire's corporeality. It is interpreted as a tool of his adaptation to human society and, at the same time, the formation of his own family sociality. The author concludes that sovietism is a way of distributing the clan's social functions and a strategy of axiological marking of personal relationships.
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